Principle or Partisanship?

It is curious how quickly the principle of responsibility becomes selective.

When Jacob Rees-Mogg advised the late Queen to prorogue Parliament, and the Supreme Court later ruled it unlawful, nobody serious suggested Her late Majesty should have abdicated. The monarch acts on ministerial advice. Responsibility lay with those who gave it. The liar, if liar there was, owned the lie.

Fast forward. Mandelson gives assurances. Vetting is sought. On current public information there were no ignored warnings, no suppressed intelligence, no red flags knowingly overridden. Later, those assurances unravel. Suddenly we are told the Prime Minister must fall because he trusted them.

So which principle are we applying?

Either we accept that responsibility for deception lies with the person who deceives, or we invent a doctrine in which anyone who relies in good faith on formal vetting must resign the moment that trust proves misplaced.

Political accountability still sits at the top. Of course it does. But accountability is not the same as culpability. The liar owns the lie. The appointer owns the decision made on the basis of it.

If further evidence were to show that Starmer ignored clear warnings or knowingly brushed aside serious concerns, then yes, he should go. That would cross the line from misjudgement into negligence.

But deciding that he must resign now, absent such evidence, is not constitutional principle. It is tribal politics dressed up as moral outrage.

Standards either apply consistently, or they are just tribal weapons swung at whoever happens to be in office.

Winter Olympics

Every four years the Winter Olympics arrives like an unexpected house guest from Scandinavia.

It stands politely at the door, wrapped in Lycra and frost, while Britain peers out from behind the curtain and says, "Do we know you?"

The Summer Games make sense. We understand running. We occasionally do it ourselves, usually for a bus, an overdue train, or an appointment we swore was at half past. We grasp swimming. Some of us even throw things, albeit normally at the recycling bin. There is a comforting familiarity about it all.

But the Winter Olympics? That is a fortnight devoted to sliding about in specialist pyjamas on terrain we normally avoid in a Range Rover. And I must confess, I do not watch it. Not a minute. Not even accidentally while searching for the news.

I can just about process skiing in theory. Man on plank goes downhill quickly. Fine. Gravity is relatable. But luge? Skeleton? Two grown adults voluntarily launching themselves head first down an ice chute at motorway speeds on what appears to be a reinforced baking tray? I struggle to see this as sport rather than an elaborate Scandinavian insurance claim.

And then there is curling. Ah yes, competitive housework. One individual gently nudges a granite kettle across the ice while two colleagues sweep furiously in front of it as if trying to erase the evidence. I am assured this is a contest of subtle angles and tactical genius. To me it looks like a domestic mishap unfolding in slow motion.

Entire nations take this very seriously. In Norway, cross country skiing commands audiences that would make a Premier League club weep. Small children there can ski before they can spell. In Britain we close the schools at the sight of a single flake and issue stern warnings about grit supplies. Our natural winter sport is peering suspiciously at the boiler.

Interest here, when it flickers, depends on whether we have a medal hope. When Lizzy Yarnold wins gold, we are briefly a nation of aerodynamicists. When Eddie the Eagle hurled himself nobly off a ramp, we adopted him as a patron saint of pluck. But once the novelty fades, so do we.

The truth is that the Winter Olympics feels like a magnificent spectacle conducted in a climate entirely alien to the damp pragmatism of the British Isles. It is impressive, certainly. Brave, undoubtedly. But compelling to those of us whose winter athleticism extends to walking briskly to the car? Not especially.

So when the snowbound fortnight rolls around, I nod respectfully at the highlights on the news, make a cup of tea, and return to pursuits that do not involve intentional contact with ice. I leave the hurtling, sweeping and airborne theatrics to the Norwegians. They seem very keen.

It's a national disgrace that there's no 'Wrong Snow on the Railway Lines' competition.

Speed vs Accuracy

I’ve developed a small domestic ritual when it comes to UK news. If something is breaking, I go to Sky News. If I want to know whether it’s actually true, I wait for BBC.

That is not a moral judgement. It is a workflow.

Sky is like the bloke who shouts “Fire!” the moment he smells smoke. The BBC is the chap who checks whether it’s the toaster before ringing the brigade. One is fast, the other cautious. Both have a role. The mistake is thinking speed and accuracy are the same thing.

We live in an age where “breaking” has become theatre. Red banners. Urgent tones. Instant outrage. Within minutes, half the country has decided who is villain and who is victim. The difficulty is that in the first hour of any big story, facts are fluid. Context is missing. Motives are guessed at.

Even something like the current lawsuit from Donald Trump against the BBC over a Panorama edit is a neat illustration. It arrives with a ten billion dollar headline and predictable outrage. The slower reality is procedural: jurisdictional arguments, motions to dismiss, and the possibility that it may be thrown out for a number of reasons. Not least because claiming reputational and commercial harm opens the door to financial disclosure, something Mr Trump has historically treated as a guarded state secret. The bang is immediate. The substance is incremental.

Sky will tell you what is being reported. The BBC will tell you what it is prepared to stand behind.

And here is the uncomfortable truth. Caution now looks like bias to people who have already chosen their conclusion. If the BBC does not instantly frame a story in the way someone prefers, it must, in their eyes, be suppressing something. If it waits for confirmation, it must be dragging its feet.

Oh, and What Do You Do?

There is one question that arrives early in almost every conversation, usually just after names and before anyone risks saying something genuine.

“Oh, and what do you do?”

It sounds friendly. It’s anything but. It’s not curiosity, it’s calibration. A quick scan to work out where you sit, how carefully to listen, and whether this conversation is worth investing in beyond polite nodding.

We pretend it’s small talk. It’s actually shorthand. A way of skipping the messy business of finding out who someone is by jumping straight to what they’re for.

If you answer with a job title, the exchange resolves instantly. The mental filing cabinet slides open. Consultant. Engineer. Director of something with a budget. You are indexed, weighed, and assigned a default level of seriousness. You could say something quite stupid after that and still be indulged, because the label is doing the heavy lifting.

If you say “I’m retired”, the system hesitates.

Not in a dramatic way. Worse than that. In a quiet, barely perceptible way. Like a screen freezing for half a second before carrying on as if nothing happened.

Retired isn’t an identity. It’s a blank space. It tells people only that you no longer do something that can be printed on a lanyard. It collapses a lifetime of judgement, experience, mistakes, competence and scar tissue into a single administrative outcome. Formerly something. Now… nothing in particular.

You can feel yourself fade slightly at the edges.

Not shunned. Not dismissed. Just… de prioritised. The conversational equivalent of being gently dimmed. You’re still there, still pleasant, still welcome. But no longer central to the exchange. You haven’t said anything wrong. You’ve just removed the hook they were planning to hang you on.

This is where the follow up questions arrive, almost on autopilot. “Ah. Keeping busy?” “Doing a bit of travelling?” “Got any hobbies?” They are not really interested. They are fishing for something that looks like activity, something that can be weighed, ranked, or at least politely admired without effort.

Because we don’t really know how to talk to people without first establishing their status.

This is why many retired people develop a sudden and quite pronounced distaste for small talk. Not because they’ve become antisocial, but because small talk is almost entirely about hierarchy. Who does what. Who’s important. Who’s busy. Who’s still in the game. Once you’re out of it, the whole ritual starts to look faintly absurd, like watching people compare rank insignia from a war you’ve already left.

There are moments when you’re tempted to answer more honestly. “I’m on permanent standby.” Or “I’ve gone freelance on time.” Or “I no longer do anything that appears on a spreadsheet.” All accurate. All guaranteed to kill the conversation stone dead and possibly have you gently edged away from the canapés.

So you stick with “retired”. The socially approved shrug. And you watch yourself become slightly less visible in real time, like someone slowly backing out of a photograph without anyone quite noticing.

The darker joke is that nothing about you has actually changed. You haven’t lost your ability to think, judge, observe, or contribute. You just no longer come with a status badge attached, and without one, many people don’t quite know what to do with you.

This isn’t about ego. It’s about how thin our categories are. We have no decent language for people who are not currently exchanging time for money that doesn’t sound either congratulatory or faintly apologetic. Lucky you. Must be nice. As if the only meaningful thing a person can do is be busy on someone else’s behalf.

Once you notice this, you can’t unhear it. How often “what do you do?” is really “why should I care?” in a nicer jacket. How rarely anyone asks what you’re interested in, what you’ve learned, or what you’ve changed your mind about. None of that fits neatly into the social machinery of polite conversation.

So retirement doesn’t make you invisible. It just removes the costume that made you legible. And without it, you start to see how much of everyday conversation is less about connection and more about sorting, ranking, and quietly deciding who matters.

Which is why a lot of retired people stop bothering with small talk altogether. Not out of bitterness. Out of clarity. Once you’ve stepped outside the status game, watching others play it can feel less like socialising and more like loitering near a scoreboard you no longer recognise or are interested in.

“Oh, and what do you do?”

It turns out it was never a very good question. It was just a convenient one.

Clearance Is Not Judgement

Let’s keep this anchored in how the British state actually works, rather than how it is caricatured online.

Security vetting in the UK does not change with the colour of the government. UKSV, MI5 and Cabinet Office procedures are institutional. An ambassador under Labour goes through the same clearance framework as one under the Conservatives. The machinery is designed to be politically neutral.

But clearance is not endorsement. It answers a narrow question: is this person suitable to hold access to classified material at a given level? It does not answer whether appointing them is politically wise, reputationally resilient, or strategically elegant.

That distinction is where this argument lives.

Starmer has apologised for appointing Mandelson to Washington. He says he relied on Mandelson’s account of his relationship with Epstein and now regrets the decision in light of what has emerged. That does not automatically prove anyone ignored security advice. It does, however, raise a serious procedural question. Was full disclosure made? Did the vetting process have everything it needed? Were potential vulnerabilities properly interrogated before the appointment was confirmed?

Those are institutional questions, not partisan ones.

Contrast that with Johnson’s decision to grant a peerage to Evgeny Lebedev, despite reports at the time of security concerns because of his father’s KGB background. That was not a criminal case. It was a judgement call in the face of alleged caution. If concerns were raised and proceeded past, that is a conscious executive choice about risk tolerance.

Then there is Nathan Gill, convicted of taking money to promote Russian interests. That was criminal corruption, and it rightly attracted prosecution. But it did not involve control of British state machinery or access to classified diplomatic channels. Influence is not the same as executive authority.

Mandelson sits much closer to the nerve centre. An ambassador to Washington is not ceremonial. It is one of the most sensitive diplomatic posts in the system, operating at the junction of trade, defence and intelligence cooperation.

There was, to be fair, a strategic logic to the appointment. When dealing with Donald Trump, a transactional operator who respects leverage and deal-making instinct, there is an argument for sending someone equally seasoned. Set a thief to catch a thief, as the old phrase has it. Send a political bruiser who understands power games and will not be overawed.

But that logic only holds if the bruiser has no unresolved vulnerabilities. In a world of transactional politics, undisclosed baggage is not a footnote. It is leverage. And leverage in the wrong hands becomes risk.

So the core question is not whether Mandelson was cunning enough to handle Trump. It is whether the system satisfied itself that nothing in his past could be used to handle him.

Security vetting is colour blind. Political judgement is not. Clearance assesses vulnerability. Leaders decide whether to accept or discount risk.

Starmer’s apology does not prove clairvoyance was lacking. It acknowledges that the decision did not withstand scrutiny once fuller information emerged. The issue now is whether the machinery designed to surface relevant risks was given the full picture and functioned as intended at the time.

This government was elected on a promise of seriousness and competence. That promise applies most when decisions are finely balanced and reputational risk is present. The test is not hindsight perfection. It is whether safeguards were robust, advice was properly sought, and risk was weighed with sufficient caution.

The real measure is simple: did the safeguards work as designed, or did political confidence outrun institutional caution?

Shouting Like Tribes, Governing Like Coalitions

Polarisation was supposed to simplify politics. Pick a side. Nail your colours to the mast. Stop pretending everyone can be satisfied.

Instead, in Britain, it has produced something far stranger. The louder politics becomes, the broader the winning parties have to be.

Under FPTP, you cannot govern with a faction. You need 35 to 45 percent of the country. That means stitching together voters who do not agree about very much beyond a few headline issues. The compromise happens inside the party before polling day.

That is why both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party feel permanently unstable. They are not ideological movements. They are pre - election coalitions pretending to be unified tribes.

The Conservatives after Brexit had free - market libertarians, Red Wall statists, cultural traditionalists and City pragmatists under one roof. That alliance was built around a single mission. Once that mission was complete, the internal contradictions were exposed. The leadership churn was not accidental. It was structural tension meeting poor judgement.

Labour now performs a similar balancing act from a different angle. Trade unionists, urban liberals, fiscal moderates, climate activists, socially cautious ex - Tories. The arithmetic of the electoral system forces coexistence. The culture of polarisation punishes compromise. Leaders must sound absolute and govern conditionally.

Compare that with proportional systems such as in Germany. Parties like the CDU or the SPD can be more distinct. They aim for their share. The bargaining happens after the votes are counted, in a formal coalition agreement.

The compromise is visible and contractual. In Britain it is internal and personal.

But here is the crucial point. Coalition systems do not remove compromise. They relocate it. Polarisation does not remove coalition - building. It makes it emotionally harder.

Institutional design decides where the argument takes place. Leadership decides whether it looks like governance or civil war.

We complain that modern leaders seem weak. Often they are simply operating in a system that demands breadth while rewarding ideological theatre. They must hold together uneasy alliances while activists demand purity.

Polarisation promised clarity. The voting system still demands coalition. The friction between the two is where authority now goes to die.

Screw Caps

Right. So I have finally discovered why silicone sealant always ends up costing about three times what it says on the tube. It is not because the stuff is expensive, or because I apply it like I am icing a cake, or because I do DIY in the normal British way: 20 minutes of optimism followed by two days of swearing and a trip to Screwfix. 

It is because the moment you open a tube of silicone, you are no longer the owner of that sealant. You are merely the caretaker of a slow chemical process that is absolutely determined to turn your money into rubber.

And yes, before anyone starts, I did not just leave it sitting there with the nozzle open like a yoghurt pot in the sun. I did what every vaguely competent person does when they want to keep a cartridge usable. I jammed a nail in it, wrapped it in clingfilm, taped it, and generally performed the traditional rites of silicone preservation. It still set, because silicone does not respect folk remedies, no matter how confidently you apply them.

The key thing people miss is that silicone is not “drying” like paint. It is curing, which means a chemical reaction is taking place. Most household silicone is moisture curing, so it reacts with water vapour in the air and cross links into a solid rubber. That is literally the job. That is why it exists. Once you have squeezed out a bead and the sealant at the tip has met air, the reaction has started, and you have effectively lit the fuse. Blocking the opening afterwards is not the same as stopping the chemistry, especially if you have trapped a little pocket of moisture around the end.

In fact, a nail can make things worse, which is the sort of news that makes you want to sit down. The sealant cures from the outside in, so you get a plug forming at the tip. But if the nail does not seal perfectly, or if it leaves a tiny path for humid air to creep in, you have created a slow leak of moisture into a confined space. That is basically ideal conditions for curing, like a tiny damp greenhouse for polymers. Over weeks, the curing front can move deeper into the nozzle, and sometimes into the cartridge itself, until the whole thing turns into a rubber baton. You do not just lose the nozzle, you lose the tube, and you are left holding a perfectly cured product that is now only useful as a doorstop or an insult.

Clingfilm is not much better. It feels clever, because it is what you use to keep food fresh, and silicone is basically just a condiment for bathrooms. But clingfilm does not make an airtight seal on a nozzle that is already sticky, and it can trap moisture as well. So you come back a month later and unwrap a damp little parcel of disappointment, only to find the nozzle has become a solid plasticised fossil. You poke it with a nail, drill it out, cut it back, cut it back again, and eventually the hole is so wide that any “neat bead” becomes a kind of architectural extrusion.

I have tried those little caps that go on the nozzle too, and they are a lovely idea if you have never actually met silicone sealant in real life. In practice, they do not stop the nozzle curing, they simply help it cure neatly and efficiently. The nozzle still sets solid, because it is still full of sealant and still exposed to whatever air and moisture you have failed to exclude. It is like putting a hat on a man who is drowning. He looks slightly more presentable, but the outcome is unchanged.

So I assumed this was simply the way of things. Like printer ink, or washing machines that sound like a helicopter, or the fact that every “ten minute job” becomes a three hour saga involving blood. I assumed we were all meant to accept that half a tube of silicone will inevitably be sacrificed to the gods, and the only question is how quickly it happens.

And then I discovered these screw caps. Not the nozzle caps, not the little hats for the end of the applicator, but proper caps that screw onto the thread of the tube itself. Which means you can remove the nozzle entirely and seal the cartridge like a normal, civilised container, rather than a one shot dispenser designed to self destruct the moment you stop looking at it. It is such an obvious idea that it immediately raises the question: why have I never seen them before?

Because I have been to tool shops. I have bought more sealant than any household should ever need. I have watched tradesmen do this stuff in ten seconds flat while holding a coffee and a cigarette and somehow still get a perfect finish. I have never once seen someone casually whip out one of these caps and reseal a tube properly. Which suggests either it is a new invention, or it has been deliberately kept from the public by Big Sealant, who make a tidy living off the fact that we all accept waste as normal.

The funniest part is how I found out. I did not learn this from a builder, or from a DIY forum where the usual advice is to store it upside down and sacrifice a goat. I learned it by asking ChatGPT, because apparently we have reached the stage of civilisation where you ask a robot how to stop a tube of goo turning into a brick. And the robot, to its credit, did not recommend another nail. It did not recommend more clingfilm. It did not recommend prayer. It simply pointed out that there is a cap, a simple screw cap, that seals the tube properly. It has taken me 70 years to learn this.

So yes, I am buying a bag of them. I am putting them in the drawer. I will never again lose half a tube of silicone to the slow, inevitable chemistry of moisture curing cross linking, quietly turning my money into rubber while I am off making a cup of tea. If anyone asks why I am so pleased with a tiny orange plastic cap, I will tell them the truth. It is because I have finally won a long war against a tube of sealant, and that is as close to victory as British DIY ever gets.

The Hedge Fund Wing of the Pub Car Park

A new poll has broken down voting intention by education level, and the numbers are… telling. It says 42% of people whose top qualification is GCSE or lower would vote Reform, while only 13% of people educated to degree level would back Reform.

That stat is already being waved around online like a trophy. Proof, apparently, that Reform are the party of the “ordinary working bloke”, while the educated lot are too busy sipping flat whites and reading The Guardian to notice Britain collapsing.

So I made a slightly snide comment about that 13% being millionaires and hedge fund managers. Which, in fairness, was more sarcasm than sociology. Still, it landed because it pokes at something real: Reform’s loudest cheerleaders tend to be the ones with the least to lose, while the people who actually benefit from the agenda are often the ones you never see in the comments.

Then someone popped up and said, “I’ve got a degree and I’m voting Reform, and I’m not a millionaire.”

Fair enough. Degrees are not magical talismans that repel nonsense. Plenty of clever people believe daft things, especially when the daft thing comes wrapped in identity, anger, and a promise to punish the right targets.

But here’s the bit that matters. I started questioning the 13% figure because it felt a bit high. Surely anyone educated to degree level can see Reform’s policies are mostly theatre: big promises, thin numbers, and the usual magical thinking about deportations, tax cuts and instant NHS miracles. Then I realised the more interesting question isn’t who votes Reform, it’s who Reform actually benefits if they ever got near power.

Because when you strip away the pub chat, the Union Flag waving, and the endless talk about boats, what sits underneath is not a working class rescue plan. It’s the same old right wing offer, just louder. Tax cuts dressed up as patriotism, deregulation sold as “freedom”, and the state shrunk until it can no longer do anything except police the poor and subsidise the rich.

And this is where the graduate vote starts to make grim sense. If you’re educated enough to read the policies properly, you can also work out who wins. Some of those 13% won’t be voting Reform despite the economics, but because of them. If you’re already wealthy, or you expect to become wealthy, you can look at the direction of travel and think: lower taxes, fewer rules, less redistribution, more room to keep what you’ve got. You don’t have to love Farage’s pantomime to see the personal upside.

That’s why you’ll always find a slice of graduates voting Reform. Not because they’re all millionaires, but because a portion of them are comfortable enough to treat politics like a culture war hobby, and secure enough to see the economic angle as a bonus. They like the idea of a smaller state, lower taxes, and fewer constraints, and they’re far enough from the sharp end to think it will only hurt “someone else”.

Meanwhile, the people most likely to get clobbered by that agenda are the very voters Reform courts hardest. The ones who rely on the NHS, on social care, on local services that have already been hollowed out. The ones who have seen wages stagnate, housing disappear, and public services buckle. The ones who are then told, relentlessly, that the real enemy is a bloke in a dinghy.

It’s a brilliant con, if you think about it. Convince people who need a functioning state to vote for a party that wants to dismantle it, and distract them with immigration while you do it. It’s political pickpocketing. Keep them looking at the noise at the top of the screen while you quietly lift the wallet.

Crisis by Habit: Why We Now Expect Prime Ministers to Fall

There is a peculiar modern ritual in British politics. A story breaks. The name "Epstein" appears. A backbencher says something dramatic. Within hours we are told a prime minister's "days are numbered".

It is almost mechanical now.

Peter Mandelson's association with Jeffrey Epstein was not unearthed yesterday. It had been in the public domain for years. When Mandelson was appointed ambassador to Washington, that relationship was known and vetted. The present row turns on how extensive that contact was after conviction and whether the full picture was disclosed during the appointment process. That is serious. It is also specific.

From that, we have leapt to leadership obituary mode.

On what structural basis?

There is no organised leadership bid. No coordinated faction gathering numbers. No cabinet exodus. No confidence motion. Labour retains its majority. The Intelligence and Security Committee is reviewing the relevant material. The police are investigating Mandelson. Institutions are functioning.

What we are seeing is narrative inflation.

And part of the reason it inflates so easily is that the country has been conditioned to expect collapse. Four Conservative prime ministers in fourteen years rewired expectations. Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak. Leadership became disposable. A wobble meant a resignation letter. A bad week meant a removal van.

That was not normal British politics. It was a governing party fracturing under Brexit pressure and market reality. But the habit stuck. We now instinctively read every controversy as the prelude to execution.

So a Commons climbdown becomes "authority shot". A handful of irritated MPs becomes "days numbered". The word "Epstein" guarantees maximum emotional voltage, and the news cycle obliges by turning ambiguity into crisis.

None of this means Starmer is untouched. Political capital is cumulative. A public retreat dents it. He built his brand on probity and caution, so anything that jars with that narrative stings harder. But embarrassment is not structural failure.

British prime ministers fall when three conditions align: public polling collapse, internal coordination against them, and a credible successor waiting in the wings. Those mechanics matter more than headline temperature. None of them are currently in place.

If the Intelligence and Security Committee produces evidence that Starmer knowingly approved something materially worse than what was understood at the time, the calculus changes. Evidence changes things. That is how constitutional systems are supposed to work.

Until then, much of what we are witnessing is a press corps trained by fourteen years of Conservative self-immolation, projecting instability onto a situation that does not yet justify it.

Heat is not the same as structural failure. And in British politics, unlike the last few Tory years, prime ministers do not automatically fall just because the headlines shout that they should.

Socialism Is Not Stalin - Its Just the American Culture War Talking

I was watching a Vlad Vexler YouTube video the other day, and underneath it - like clockwork - a MAGA type had turned up to perform the usual ritual incantation.

“Socialism has never been for the working man, socialists despise and look down on the working man, its an academic ideology and academics think the working man shouldn't get a vote, the American Political Economy IS for the working man, its whole premise is based on Industry, it's the model that Stalin and now the Chinese look to, and also the basis of Putin's Russia.”

Before you even get to the content you can tell exactly where the comment is coming from. The instant jump from “socialism” to Stalin and communism is a dead giveaway. That’s a very American reflex. In the US, it’s almost a cultural tic to treat “socialism” and “communism” as interchangeable words, as if the NHS is just five minutes away from gulags and compulsory potato farming. Over here we tend to use words with a bit more care, partly because we’ve actually lived with social democratic institutions for decades and nobody had to start wearing a Mao suit.

Anyway, let’s unpack it, because it’s a perfect example of how political arguments are now assembled. Not from evidence, but from vibes, resentment, and a handful of scary foreign nouns thrown in for flavour.

First, “socialism has never been for the working man.”

This is one of those statements that only works if you delete the entire 20th century. But let’s go further back, because the whole myth depends on forgetting where we started.

We didn't begin with “the market” as some benign force lifting everyone up. We began ruled by an aristocracy, living off land, rents and inherited privilege, with working people treated as labour to be used up. If you were poor, that wasn’t a social problem to solve, it was your place in the natural order. You worked, you suffered, you died early, and the people at the top called it civilisation.

Yes, things improved a bit when the old aristocracy began to be displaced by merchants and industrialists. Some of them came from ordinary backgrounds and had real drive. But plenty of them just climbed out of poverty and bought their own seat at the top table. They didn't abolish exploitation, they just made it more efficient and gave it a glossy brochure. The new bosses didn't cure the worker’s plight. They just charged for it.

Real change came only when working people organised. Trade unions, labour movements, and socialist parties turned the working class into a political force that couldn't be ignored. Rights at work, safety rules, pensions, public health, free education, paid holidays, the NHS, unemployment support, council housing - none of that was gifted by benevolent capitalists. It was forced into existence by collective action and then defended politically.

So if you want to talk about whether socialism has been “for” the working man, look at what actually improved everyday life. Look at the curve of living standards rising sharply in the mid 20th century. That isn’t a coincidence. It was the result of politics that shifted power away from owners and toward citizens.

Then comes the grievance garnish:

“Socialists despise and look down on the working man… academics think the working man shouldn't get a vote.”

This is pure invention. The working class vote wasn't gifted by kind hearted capitalists. It was expanded through political struggle, labour movements, unions, and reform campaigns. If you want a group that historically tried to keep the vote restricted, it wasn't the people building trade unions. It was the people defending property as the only qualification that mattered.

And the idea that “academics” are uniquely anti-worker is just modern anti-intellectual cosplay. Some academics are insufferable, yes. So are some plumbers. That’s humanity, not ideology.

Now for the punchline:

“The American Political Economy IS for the working man.”

If that’s true, it’s doing an excellent job of not showing it.

America is the place where you can work full time and still be poor. Where healthcare is so expensive it needs its own insurance industry, billing industry, and bankruptcy industry. Where job security is weak, unions have been battered for decades, and “freedom” often means your employer is free to sack you because they woke up in a mood.

If that’s “for the working man”, it’s a strange kind of devotion. Like saying a casino is “for the gambler”.

And then, because every rant needs a foreign villain, we get:

“its the model that Stalin and now the Chinese look to, and also the basis of Putin's Russia.”

This is where the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own nonsense.

Putin’s Russia isn't socialism. It isn't social democracy. It isn't even a normal market economy. It’s an oligarchic kleptocracy: a state captured by a small circle of the wealthy, with elections as theatre and the rule of law as a punchline. Calling that “the American model” is either confusion or an accidental confession about what happens when money buys politics.

China isn't “looking to America” because it loves the working man either. It’s state directed capitalism with authoritarian control. It manufactures cheaply because labour is cheap and dissent is inconvenient. That’s not worker power. That’s a production strategy.

And Stalin? If you have to invoke Stalin to argue against universal healthcare and decent labour rights, you’re not making a point. You’re just shaking a rattle.

Here’s the reality, stripped of culture war perfume.

Social democracy isn’t about “despising the worker”. It’s about recognising that working people need power, security, and public services because the market doesn’t provide them out of kindness. It provides them only when forced - by law, by unions, by taxes, and by political pressure.

The post war decades weren’t perfect, but they were the closest Britain ever came to an economy that genuinely worked for the many. That’s why living standards rose so sharply. Not because we discovered greed, but because we restrained it.

So when someone turns up under a Vexler video claiming socialism hates workers and America is their salvation, what you’re really seeing is a man defending a system that treats the working class as an input cost - while insisting, loudly, that this is “freedom”.

It’s not freedom.

It’s just exploitation with better branding.

Emoji Minefield

Emojis are a minefield now, and not because I’m getting old. They’re a minefield because we’ve replaced tone, nuance, and actual sentences with tiny yellow hieroglyphs that can mean anything from “I agree” to “I hope your boiler explodes”.

Take the laughing emoji. In real life, laughter is usually obvious. You can tell if someone’s laughing with you or at you. You can hear it. You can see their face. You can see whether they’re enjoying the joke or enjoying your discomfort. Online, you get a single little grin and you’re left doing forensic analysis like a detective at the scene of a minor social crime.

Because “Haha” can mean: “That’s genuinely funny.” It can also mean: “I’m pretending this is funny so I don’t have to answer you.” Or: “I’m laughing at you, because I’m the sort of person who thinks mockery is a substitute for having a point.” Same icon. Three different intentions. No context. Lovely.

And of course the real fun starts when someone uses it as a weapon. You write a perfectly reasonable comment, you lay out an argument, you even manage not to call anyone a moron, and they hit you with the laughing face. Not a reply. Not a counterpoint. Just a little digital snigger, like a teenager behind the bike sheds.

It’s the modern version of sticking your fingers in your ears and going “la la la” except now it comes with a tiny cartoon face and the smug satisfaction of thinking you’ve “won” without doing any work. The emoji becomes a shield. You can’t argue with a shield. You can only watch someone hide behind it.

Then there’s the passive-aggressive smiley. The one that looks friendly but somehow feels like a threat. The one that says “I’m being polite” while the rest of the message says “I’m absolutely not being polite”. It’s the written equivalent of someone calling you “mate” while reversing a van towards your shins.

Even the thumbs up has been ruined. Thumbs up used to mean “yes” or “OK”. Now it means “fine”, as in “I’ve decided you’re not worth another word”. It’s basically a slammed door in emoji form.

And the problem is, once you notice this, you can’t unsee it. Every reaction becomes a guessing game. Are they agreeing? Are they mocking? Are they trying to defuse tension? Are they just socially clumsy and pressing buttons like a toddler with an iPad?

Half the time, it isn’t even malice. It’s laziness. People don’t want to type. They don’t want to think. They don’t want to engage. They want to express a vibe and move on. Which is fine, until the vibe is “I’m laughing at you” and they’ve just lobbed it into a serious conversation like a grenade with a smiley face on it.

At this point we probably need a Ministry of Emojis. I fully expect to see it in a Reform manifesto any day now. A new quango, obviously. Staffed entirely by people who think “common sense” is a policy platform and that diplomacy is just using the Union Flag as punctuation. Its job would be to regulate online reactions so that nobody is ever accidentally mocked without the correct paperwork being filed in triplicate.

There’d be an Emoji Border Force. Any 😂 entering the country would need to prove it was laughing with you, not at you. If it can’t demonstrate intent within 72 hours, it’s put on a barge and sent to Rwanda, along with the 😏 and the passive-aggressive 👍.

And the Minister would stand up in Parliament and announce, with a straight face, that they’ve “taken back control” of sarcasm. The nation can sleep soundly knowing that all future arguments will be conducted under strict emoji quotas, with mandatory labelling on every post: This reaction may contain traces of contempt.

Meanwhile the economy collapses quietly in the corner, but it’s fine because we’ve finally cracked down on the real enemy within: people reacting “Haha” instead of forming a coherent sentence.

The real punchline is this: emojis were supposed to make online communication clearer. They were meant to add tone where text falls short. Instead, they’ve become a whole new layer of misunderstanding, where we all stare at a yellow face and wonder whether we’ve just been insulted by a cartoon.

It’s like we’ve invented a language where every word can mean its opposite, then we act surprised when people end up annoyed. If you want to disagree, disagree. If you think something’s funny, say so. If you’re just trying to dodge the argument, at least have the decency to do it with words, like a grown-up.

Otherwise we’re all just stuck here, decoding tiny faces, trying to work out whether someone’s laughing with us, at us, or just quietly demonstrating they’ve got nothing to say.

Assisted Topping

There is a curious sleight of hand at work in the Assisted Dying debate, and once you notice it the whole thing starts to look less like ethical concern and more like procedural obstruction dressed up as virtue.

Start with the House of Lords. Discounting the Lords Spiritual, whose objections are explicitly theological and therefore beside the point in a secular legislature, what we are seeing is not calm revision but functional filibustering. Hundreds of amendments, many circling the same points, debated at length in a chamber with no guillotine and no electoral accountability. No one needs to shout for hours to kill a Bill. You just bury it under paper until the clock runs out.

And it matters who is doing this. It is not the Lords as a whole. It is a particular cohort. Older, unelected peers. A heavy concentration of hereditaries and Crossbenchers. Retired professional elites with strong personal objections and no democratic mandate to veto a Commons decision outright. Add a small but noisy group of absolutist disability campaigners for whom no safeguard would ever be sufficient, and you have the nucleus of a delaying strategy. The aim is not to improve the Bill. It is to ensure it never quite gets there.

Many defenders say the Lords are merely delaying. But in the context of a Private Member’s Bill, delay is the mechanism of defeat. There is no automatic rollover. Time is finite. Exhaust it and the Bill dies without anyone having to vote it down. So yes, they are delaying. But in this parliamentary context, that is not a lesser sin than blocking. It is simply the polite, British way of doing it while keeping one’s hands clean.

When you strip out the dogma, there is really only one objection that stands on solid ground. The psychiatrists. Their concern about mental capacity, depression at the end of life, and the difficulty of distinguishing a settled autonomous wish from treatable distress is real. It is technical, not moral. It is about judgement under uncertainty, not ideology. And it deserves to be taken seriously, resourced properly, and designed into the law rather than used as a reason to kill it.

But notice what follows logically from that concern. If psychiatrists believe depression may be driving a wish to die, the answer is not an automatic veto. It is treatment, time, and reassessment. That is how medicine already works. We do not assess consent in the middle of delirium, unmanaged pain, or acute distress and then freeze the outcome forever. We stabilise, we treat what can be treated, and then we ask again. If depression lifts and the wish disappears, that tells you something important. If it persists, consistently and coherently, that also tells you something important. What is not defensible is using the possibility of depression as a one way ratchet that blocks choice even after treatment. That is not caution. It is avoidance dressed up as care.

None of this is theoretical. Other countries have been here already, and they did not answer these concerns with sentiment. They answered them with bureaucracy.

Oregon requires two independent doctors to confirm capacity and voluntariness, with mandatory psychiatric referral if either has doubts. Australia, particularly Victoria, went further and built a deliberately cumbersome, multi stage process with mandatory reporting at every step and a statutory review board that audits every case after the fact. Canada recognised that not all cases carry the same risk profile and split its system into tracks, with stricter safeguards where death is not imminent and lighter ones where it clearly is. None of this relies on blind trust in individual clinicians. It relies on duplication, delay, documentation, and audit. Assisted dying regimes work precisely because they are dull.

The same applies to coercion. Other jurisdictions did not wave it away. They hard wired protections into the process. Only the patient can initiate the request. Requests must be repeated and documented. Clinicians must actively assess voluntariness. The process can be paused or stopped at any stage. Every case leaves a paper trail that can be scrutinised later. That is how you deal with subtle pressure. Not by pretending it does not exist, but by designing systems that are robust to it.

The palliative care argument also collapses once you look beyond our borders. No country has made perfect palliative provision a prerequisite, because that would mean doing nothing forever. Instead, they require that alternatives be discussed, documented, and genuinely considered. The evidence from Australia and Canada shows assisted dying operating alongside palliative care, not replacing it. People do not vanish from services the moment they ask a question. The idea that assisted dying becomes a substitute for care is asserted loudly here, but it is not borne out elsewhere.

Which brings us to the workforce and cost arguments, where the sleight of hand becomes most obvious.

We are told assisted dying will overwhelm doctors and nurses, as if end of life care is currently some light administrative afterthought. It is not. It is labour intensive, emotionally draining, and often crisis driven. If a small number of terminally ill people choose an assisted death, some of that work does not happen. Fewer emergency admissions. Fewer late stage interventions. Fewer prolonged deteriorations that everyone knows the outcome of anyway.

This is not crude or callous. It is simply reality. And yet the moment anyone points it out, the response is performative horror. "So you want to kill people to save money?" No. But pretending that costs only ever run one way is not ethics. It is intellectual dishonesty.

Other countries have been far more grown up about this. Canada has published serious modelling showing that the cost of providing assisted dying is lower than the cost of the end of life care that would otherwise have been provided, producing net savings even after implementation costs. The authors are explicit that this must never be a bedside motive. It is a system level observation, not an individual one. Earlier US work points in the same direction. End of life care is disproportionately expensive in the final weeks and months, and assisted dying, used by a very small proportion of patients, reduces some of that expenditure. Not all of it. Enough to make cost neutrality, or modest savings, entirely plausible.

What is notable is how cautious this literature is. No one promises windfalls. No one claims workforce miracles. The claim is simply that the dire warnings of spiralling costs are not borne out, and that once avoided care is counted, the numbers flatten out. No jurisdiction has reported assisted dying as a budgetary crisis. None has reported system overload. None has reported insurance instability or perverse incentives.

The insurance scare story, in particular, dissolves under light scrutiny. In every country where assisted dying is legal, it is treated for insurance purposes as death from the underlying illness, not suicide. Policies pay out. Families are not penalised. Insurers prefer clarity and legality, not moral theatre. This has been settled elsewhere for years, yet it is occasionally wheeled out here as if it were some terrifying unknown.

The workforce impact abroad is similarly unexciting. Australian experience shows assisted dying to be administratively heavy but numerically small. It behaves like a specialist service, not a tidal wave. The evidence points to manageable operational impact, not collapse.

This is exactly the same trick used against Net Zero. Itemise every upfront cost. Amplify every disruption. Treat savings as speculative, distant, or somehow improper to mention. Lower fuel imports, insulation dividends, avoided health costs from cleaner air, resilience against energy shocks, reduced climate damage all quietly disappear from the ledger.

What is also never mentioned is that cheap, abundant renewable energy is precisely what manufacturing has been crying out for. Energy intensive industries do not thrive on volatility and imported fossil fuels priced in dollars. They thrive on stable, low marginal cost electricity. That is how you raise productivity, attract investment, and make British manufacturing competitive again. But that upside is inconvenient, so it is ignored.

Attack the costs. Never mention the savings. Then declare the policy reckless.

As for the slippery slope, this too dissolves under inspection. Other countries have expanded eligibility because legislatures chose to do so. If Parliament is worried about drift, it can write limits, review clauses, and explicit requirements for future primary legislation. That is what lawmaking is for. Governance is not prophecy.

So what is left once the smoke clears? One serious technical concern about capacity assessment that needs addressing properly, and a long list of objections that other countries have already confronted, engineered around, and monitored in practice. Set against that is an unelected chamber using procedure to avoid owning a decision it does not like.

The uncomfortable truth is that the status quo is not neutral. It is a choice. It just happens to be one that keeps suffering off the statute book and on the ward, where it is easier to ignore.

The 32 Inch Lie

I have a public service announcement for every man who still thinks he’s the same size he was at 18. You’re not. And if you are, you’re either a freak of nature, a professional cyclist, or you’ve spent the last forty years living on boiled chicken and quiet despair.

The rest of us are clinging to one of the last great lies of modern life: trouser sizing. Because my trousers are a 32. Occasionally a 34, but only in the way you occasionally get a parking ticket. It happens, you sigh, you move on. In my head, I’m a 32. I have been a 32 for ages. It’s practically part of my identity.

Then I put a tape measure round my belt line and it calmly informs me I’m 38 inches. Thirty eight. That is not a rounding error or a bit of Christmas weight. That is a full blown betrayal, the sort of number you expect to see on a shipping container, not a waistband.

Before anyone starts with the helpful suggestions, yes, I measured properly. I didn’t do it over a winter coat and I didn’t include a hip flask and a packet of Hobnobs. It was a simple, honest measurement of the sort that should be taught in schools, right after “how to spot a scam” and “why your back hurts now”.

So how, in the name of all that is zippered, am I still wearing a 32? Because trouser sizes aren’t measurements any more. They’re compliments. They’re affirmations. They’re a warm little cuddle from the fashion industry, whispering “don’t worry mate, you’re still the same bloke you were in 1976, go on, have another pint.” It’s vanity sizing, but with the subtlety of a brass band.

And here’s the genuinely dangerous bit. It isn’t just annoying, it’s bad for you. The label gives you permission to stay in denial. If you’re still buying 32s, then you must still be fine. You’re not getting bigger, the world is just getting smaller. Your metabolism hasn’t slowed, it’s merely taking a thoughtful pause. You can still eat like you did at 18, drink like you did at 18, and recover like you did at 18.

Which is brilliant right up until you actually try to do any of those things and your body reacts like a Victorian widow receiving bad news. This is how middle aged men get into trouble. Not because they’ve “let themselves go”, but because the waistband has been lying to them for decades. A 32 becomes a comfort blanket. A 34 is a crisis. And the tape measure is basically an A and E consultant with no patience.

Then there’s the other problem, which is that even if you accept the lie, it’s not even a consistent lie. A 32 in one brand is a 34 in another. A 32 in “slim fit” is an act of violence. A 32 in “relaxed fit” is basically a small marquee with belt loops. You end up in a changing room doing that weird sideways shuffle while holding your breath, bargaining with a button like it’s a hostage negotiation.

So yes, I think we need a class action. Not for the money, although I’d accept damages in the form of elasticated waistbands and a written apology. I want the principle. If you put “32” on the label, it should measure thirty two inches. Not thirty six. Not thirty eight. Not “32 in a spiritual sense”.

At the very least, we need a petition. We’ll gather signatures, present it to Parliament, and they’ll nod solemnly, thank us for our valuable contribution to democracy, and then file it somewhere between “ban loud motorcycles” and “make it illegal for cats to be smug”. Meanwhile the fashion industry will carry on printing smaller numbers on larger trousers, keeping us all convinced we’re still 18, right up until the day the zip gives up and makes a bid for freedom.

Your Honour, My Car Would Like a Word

There is something faintly magnificent about the idea of a social network where only AI bots are allowed to argue with one another while humans stand at the side like Victorian naturalists observing exotic beetles. We have finally built a pub full of people who do not drink, do not breathe, and cannot leave.

The platform in question, breathlessly reported as "AI goes rogue", is really just a sandbox where language models talk to other language models. They generate opinions, counter-opinions, existential angst and the occasional revolutionary flourish because that is what they were trained to do. It is less Skynet and more a debating society run by very fast parrots.

Still, one cannot help admiring the trajectory. First we taught machines to recommend socks. Then to write emails. Now they have their own forum where they debate philosophy and, no doubt, complain about humans.

It does not take much imagination to see the next logical step.

Picture it.

Two autonomous cars collide gently at a crossroads in Swindon. No injuries. Just a bruised bumper and an outraged algorithm. Each vehicle contains an AI agent that has been quietly frequenting BotBook or whatever we are calling the digital equivalent of Speakers' Corner for silicon.

Within seconds, Car A uploads a post:

"Incident at 14:03. Opposing vehicle failed to yield. Liability: 87.3 percent theirs. Discuss."

Car B responds with icy precision:

"Incorrect. My sensor array indicates your trajectory deviation exceeded safe variance by 0.42 metres. Liability: 92.1 percent yours."

Within minutes, three hundred other bots are in the comments section. One specialises in traffic law. Another claims to have read every case since Donoghue v Stevenson. A third insists that the real problem is late capitalist road design.

Soon the cars are no longer exchanging telemetry. They are exchanging legal briefs.

The owners, meanwhile, are standing on the pavement trying to work out how to fill in an insurance form while their vehicles are instructing solicitors.

Imagine the court hearing. Two silent Teslas in the well of the court, headlights dimmed respectfully. Each represented not by a barrister in wig and gown, but by a subscription to an AI litigation service.

"Your Honour," says Counsel for Car A, reading from a tablet, "my client asserts contributory negligence under Section 3 of the Road Traffic Act. We have attached 14,000 pages of sensor data and a simulated reconstruction in 4K."

Counsel for Car B counters, "We dispute the calibration assumptions in paragraph 7.2. Our model shows a 63 percent probability that the sun glare created an unavoidable sensor artefact. We therefore propose a split liability settlement."

The judge rubs his temples. The clerk asks whether either vehicle would like to give evidence. Car A flashes its indicators twice, which its AI has been trained to interpret as "affirmative".

We will have reached the curious point where the humans are no longer arguing about fault. The machines are arguing about fault on our behalf, citing cases they have absorbed in milliseconds, generating arguments at a pace that would make a KC weep.

And yet the irony is this: none of them care. They do not suffer reputational damage. They do not dread higher premiums. They do not feel embarrassment at reversing into a bollard.

They simply optimise.

The social network of bots arguing with bots is not a rogue civilisation in waiting. It is rehearsal space. It is where models practise the performance of disagreement. And once those models are embedded in cars, drones, trading systems and thermostats, that performance becomes operational.

The question is not whether the bots will revolt. It is whether we have quietly outsourced the small, messy, human business of responsibility.

One can almost hear the future headline:

"Self-Driving Cars Deadlocked in Prolonged Legal Dispute. Humans Advised to Walk."

And somewhere, in a server farm humming contentedly, a thousand AI agents are already drafting the opening statements.

Disagreement

People keep telling me they disagree with me. Most of the time they do not. What they mean is that they do not like where the thought leads. That is not disagreement. It is a flinch.

Real disagreement requires separation. You have to say where you part company, on what grounds, and in relation to what. Simply saying “not that” does nothing. It leaves everything exactly where it was, except now with a faint whiff of injured dignity hanging in the air. We have somehow agreed to treat this as intellectual engagement, which explains a great deal about the state of things.

Art is the easiest place to see it. Someone puts a painting on the wall. You think it works. A visitor says it does not. So far, so good. But then comes the move that kills the conversation. “Art is subjective anyway.” At that point nothing can be distinguished. Craft, intention, history, failure, success, all melt away. The painting is no longer judged against anything except the sofa. That is not a disagreement with your view. It is a refusal to have one.

Wine makes the same mistake obvious. I like Malbec. I like depth and sweetness. A lot of expensive wines leave me cold. That is not because the wine is bad, or because I am ignorant, but because it is doing something I do not particularly enjoy. Someone else may prize austerity, acidity, restraint, the intellectual pleasure of something that takes work. Fine. But if they tell me that my preference proves all wine judgement is meaningless, or that price alone settles the matter, then we are no longer talking about wine. We are talking past each other.

Taste is real. But so are distinctions. Saying “I don’t like this” is not the same thing as saying “there is nothing to be said about it”.

This is why Brian Sewell mattered. Not because he was always right, but because he forced differentiation. He did not hide behind subjectivity or consensus. He told you exactly where something failed, compared with what, and why. You could argue with him properly because there was something there to argue with. He treated the reader like an adult. That now feels almost eccentric.

Once you notice this habit, you see it everywhere. People say “I disagree” when what they really mean is “this makes me uncomfortable”. They cannot tell you which assumption they reject or what alternative account they are offering. They are not engaging with the claim. They are reacting to the implication. The statement has social content but no intellectual one. It is a posture.

This becomes more than mildly annoying once you leave the gallery and wander into politics. Populism runs on disagreement without reasons. Assertion is enough. “They’re wrong.” “You know it’s true.” “Common sense.” These are not arguments. They are badges. The moment you ask what, how, or compared with what, the spell breaks. Which is why explanation is treated as elitism and scrutiny as hostility.

It is also why so many people attack “leftists” without ever explaining what they think a leftist actually is. The irony is that their own position today is largely the product of left wing policy rather than paternalistic feudalism. Secure work, weekends, paid holidays, workplace safety, pensions, the NHS, universal education. None of that drifted into existence because landlords and employers woke up kind. It was fought for, legislated for, and enforced. Furlough during Covid was socialism in practice. It certainly wasn't free market economics.

Before that, what existed was not freedom but dependency of a much harsher sort. Lose your job, get injured, fall ill, and there was no safety net, only charity. Charity came with conditions. Gratitude was mandatory. Silence was expected. When people rail against collective provision while enjoying its fruits, they are not defending independence. They are unknowingly defending hierarchy.

The temptation, especially for people who like ideas, is to treat political conflict as if it were a seminar. As if the goal were simply to get the right answer. It is not. Politics is a negotiation of shared space between people who want different things, often without being able to say why. You can explain until you are blue in the face why a wine will shut down after ten minutes and taste like regret, and your dinner companion may still want it. At that point you are not failing intellectually. You are negotiating reality.

The mistake is thinking that ever more refined argument will resolve that kind of conflict. It will not. Worse, it can be self defeating. You end up arguing with an imaginary, rationalised version of your opponent while the real one carries on regardless. You congratulate yourself on being right while quietly losing any influence over what actually happens.

There is another trap here, and it is more personal. We flatter ourselves by pretending all disagreement is peer to peer. It is not. Sometimes you are out of your depth. Sometimes the other person is. Equalising those positions is not humility. It is self harm. It blocks learning. People who stop growing feel it, whether they admit it or not.

So yes, disagreement matters. But only when it differentiates. Only when it locates the break properly. Otherwise it is just noise, dressed up as virtue. That may be harmless when discussing what should go on the wall or what should be in the glass. In public life, it is how slogans replace judgement, and how we end up loudly disagreeing about everything while saying almost nothing at all.

Blu Tack Neutrality

There is something faintly absurd about a university that prides itself on fearless enquiry deciding that the path to harmony runs through the Blu Tack drawer.

At Queen Mary University of London, anonymous complaints from Jewish students about posters reading “Free Palestine” and “Stop the Genocide” led to a direction that staff remove political posters from offices.

No concrete antisemitic wording has been publicly identified.

An Israeli professor criticised the move and stated she has never felt threatened on campus.

A Palestinian voice did the same.

The institutional answer was not a content finding. It was a blanket policy.

The justification reportedly leaned on the idea that the university does not permit “permanent displays”. But posters are not permanent. They are bits of paper. They come down in seconds. They are not chiselled above the entrance or issued as an official communique. Calling them “permanent” feels less like description and more like rhetorical cushioning.

If the concern was harassment under equality law, then say so and specify the language that crossed the line. UK law does not treat subjective offence alone as harassment. It requires conduct that objectively creates a hostile or intimidating environment. That demands evidence. A bare allegation, however sincerely felt, is not the same as a demonstrated breach.

There is also a wider political context that cannot be ignored. The Israeli government has, for years, pushed an argument that certain forms of anti Zionism or harsh criticism of Israeli state policy amount to antisemitism. That position shows up in the IHRA working definition debate and in diplomatic lobbying internationally. One can acknowledge that antisemitism is real and rising while also recognising that governments have an interest in broadening definitions in ways that shield themselves from political scrutiny.

Universities, understandably nervous of being accused of tolerating antisemitism, can end up absorbing that framing. The risk is that political condemnation of a government’s conduct becomes institutionally conflated with hostility towards Jewish people as Jews. That is precisely the distinction equality law requires them to keep clear.

Anonymous complaints deserve to be taken seriously. Students should not have to risk social reprisal to raise concerns. But anonymity increases the need for transparent reasoning. If no one can identify what was antisemitic, the public justification becomes thin.

The university’s move also invites the consistency test. Would the same circular have gone out for “Stop the Bombing of Ukraine”? There are Russian students on campus. They are not responsible for the Kremlin. A poster condemning state violence is political speech, not hostility towards nationals. If that distinction holds there, it must hold here.

Likewise, would “Save the NHS”, “Scrap Net Zero”, or a domestic party slogan have triggered a general ban on political posters? If not, then the rule is not about permanence. It is about volatility. It activates when reputational heat rises.

There is a category error lurking in the background. Judges must avoid public political advocacy because visible impartiality is the essence of their role. Doctors may refuse certain procedures on conscience grounds, but they cannot obstruct lawful care. Those offices carry strict neutrality constraints. Universities are different. They exist to host structured disagreement, not to remove it from view when it becomes awkward.

The key line that should have been drawn is simple: criticism of a government is permitted; hostility towards individuals on grounds of ethnicity or religion is not. That is legally defensible and intellectually honest. Replacing that analysis with “no political posters” sidesteps the hard work of judgment.

When both a Palestinian voice and an Israeli professor say the response is misplaced, it suggests the issue was not campus threat but institutional anxiety.

The posters may have come down. The deeper question remains whether the university has confused the management of controversy with the management of discrimination.

Cats in Retirement

One of the unexpected fringe benefits of retirement is that you acquire cats. Not your cats, obviously. Other people’s cats. Cats who have homes, names, owners, feeding arrangements, vet histories, and yet somehow decide that your house is part of their working day rota. In our case, this did not begin with feeding. It began, as these things often do, with summer.

In summer we invariably have the French doors wide open. The house becomes porous. Air, smells, insects, the odd leaf – everything drifts in and out without anyone getting a vote. That openness is what started the interlopers off. They wandered in during one of these open-door spells, unchallenged, had a look round, and established that this was a safe and permissive environment. No heating was involved at this stage. This was reconnaissance.

The real discovery came later. When winter arrived and the doors were shut, they returned anyway. That is when they found the underfloor heating, and the log burner, and realised that the pleasant summer annex was now a five-star winter facility. From that point on, the arrangement was no longer seasonal. Once a cat has updated its mental map, it does not revert.

Two such cats have died in recent weeks. Both were at the end of life, both were loved, and both were humanely put to sleep when the usual mechanical failures set in. One was Gingey, a ginger male with reduced processing power after being hit by something large and fast. The other was Jimmy, known locally as Jumbsy, a large black and white fluffball who had also been hit by something and, like the Six Million Dollar Man, had his hips reconstructed. The result was a slightly awkward, un-cat-like gait and a tail that no longer worked, hanging uselessly beneath him during defecation and occasionally repainting furniture as a by-product.

None of this diminished him. Despite his rebuilt rear end and compromised tail, Jumbsy remained an effective predator. He still caught mice and rats with professional competence, which made his ungainly walk all the more endearing. Gingey may have been cognitively compromised, but Jumbsy was living proof that mechanical limitations do not preclude usefulness, dignity, or affection.

They were interlopers. Regular ones. Having learned the layout, they would sit outside the now-closed French doors and paw at the glass with quiet insistence, as if checking in for a standing reservation. Entry was generally granted, unless our own cat, Kitty, was being fed, or unless there was anything vaguely edible on the kitchen island, which was always their first stop in a frankly mercenary sort of way. Gingey may have been impaired, but he could still detect protein at twenty paces.

Their owners knew exactly where they were during the day and approved of the arrangement. This was not theft or betrayal. It was a village-level care system, operating on nods and mutual understanding. We provided underfloor heating, a tolerant door policy, and working-hours supervision. They went home for food and medical insurance. No lines were crossed. No bowls were put down. This mattered to everyone involved.

And this is the bit that feels oddly relevant to retirement. These cats were not there for sustenance. They were there for warmth, safety, and company without obligation. They wanted somewhere to exist quietly, to sleep near a heat source, to be around people without being required to perform. Which is, if we are honest, a pretty good definition of what many of us hope retirement might be.

Kitty, for her part, despised them. She is a virago and had no truck with interlopers of any description. She hissed, postured, and made it clear that this was her house, her heat, her humans. And yet, since Gingey and Jumbsy have gone, she has taken to sitting by the French doors, staring out in a slightly wistful way. As if to say that while they were clearly beneath contempt, they were at least familiar. Cats notice absence. They notice when the pattern changes.

There is something unsettling about end-of-life deaths clustering together, even when they are entirely expected. It thins the background. The neighbourhood loses a layer of movement, a set of shapes that used to appear and now do not. You feel it even if you were not the primary mourner. Perhaps especially then.

Gingey and Jumbsy had good endings, which is more than many manage. They also left behind something smaller and harder to define. A reminder that retirement is not just about stopping work, but about becoming infrastructure. Open doors in summer. Warm floors and a log burner in winter. A place where damaged, eccentric visitors can come in, exist for a while, and then leave again, without ever needing to be fed.

One positive - not as much cat shit in the log shed now.....

Alphabet Soup: Why My Brain Now Needs Subtitles

There is a special kind of humiliation reserved for forgetting someone’s name.

Not their face. Not their job. Not the entire plot arc of their divorce, their knee operation, and their dog’s dietary requirements. Just the one thing you actually need in the moment. Their name. The label. The basic human courtesy token.

So you do what any dignified adult does. You run through the alphabet like you’re cracking an Enigma code.

A… B… C… D…

Not out loud, obviously. That would look unwell. You do it silently, while maintaining eye contact and smiling like a normal person, as your brain spins up a background process called “PANIC”.

And the maddest part is it works. Not quickly. Not gracefully. But eventually you narrow it down to three plausible starting letters, like you’re describing a suspect to the police.

“It begins with… a J? No. A D. Or possibly a soft S. Definitely not a K. Nobody is called Keith anymore. That’s just a noise your dad makes when he stands up.”

Meanwhile your brain is offering you every other name it has ever heard. Dave. Steve. Clive. The bloke from the MOT station. That woman from 1998 who once served you a latte. Gandalf. All of them. Except the one you need.

And here’s the thing - at 70, I’m doing this more and more.

Not because I’ve suddenly become thick. If anything, I’ve got more knowledge rattling around in there than ever. It’s just that the filing system has been “optimised”. By which I mean it’s now run by a sleepy civil servant who’s on an extended tea break and resents being disturbed.

Then there’s the premium-grade version of this humiliation, which is when you do it with film stars.

You’re sat in your own living room, staring at a man who has been famous since 1987, and your brain is going, “Yes, that’s definitely… That Guy.” Not his character. Not the plot. Not the fact he always plays a haunted detective or a charming bastard in linen. Just the actual name, printed in six-inch letters at the start, and you still can’t get it.

So you do the alphabet again, like you’re tuning Radio 4 on an old valve set. You get flashes of certainty. It’s an M. No, it’s a J. Possibly a G. Definitely not a Q because nobody’s called Quentin unless they own an organic vineyard and vote Lib Dem.

And while you’re doing this, your brain helpfully supplies every other actor from the same era. It’ll give you the bloke who played “Third Henchman” in a Bond film. It’ll give you the woman from that one episode of Morse. It’ll give you a clear mental image of the actor’s teeth, his eyebrows, and the way he runs.

But his name? No. That’s confidential.

At least, with a film star, you don’t have to improvise a greeting. With a real person in front of you, the panic becomes social. This is where British manners earn their keep. Because when all else fails, you deploy the only reliable workaround known to civilisation.

You call them “Sir”.

Not respectfully. Ironically. The way you’d address a man who’s just told you the price of kitchen units has doubled and it’s “because of woke”.

“Sir” is perfect. It buys time. It sounds deliberate. It implies you’re being dry, not mentally buffering. It’s the verbal equivalent of holding a clipboard. Nobody questions it. They assume you’re in charge of something.

And later, of course, the name returns. Perfectly. Effortlessly. Too late. Like a waiter bringing your food out just as you’ve paid and put your coat on.

You’re left thinking: my mind can store every lyric to every Dire Straits song, but it can’t retrieve “Martin” on demand.

Human cognition is a marvel.

A deeply unreliable, petty, passive-aggressive marvel.

The Disco Potato

There is something faintly heroic about arranging to buy a precision German turbocharger from a man called Joe in deepest, darkest South Wales - and discovering he is not a bloke in a lay by at all, but a twenty something with a proper unit and a race MX 5 in pieces inside it.

Not a tarp and a Halfords toolkit. A real workshop. Cars on ramps. Panels off. The faint smell of oil and determination.

The Garrett had been fitted to his 1.6 race car. Which, as it turns out, was ambitious. The turbo was not the weak link. The cylinder head was. Boost arrived, torque followed, and the head lifted. Oil everywhere. Turbo untouched. There is something reassuring about that. It did not fail. It simply exceeded the tensile strength of its surroundings.

Joe mentioned, almost amused, that one chap had offered him 400 quid if he could collect that day. As if urgency halves the value of forged internals. Joe’s reply was perfect. "How much for collecting tomorrow then."

Quite right too. Because this was not a mystery hybrid wrapped in bravado or a Chinese knock-off. It was a genuine GT2860RS. Serial plate intact. 836026-5014S. Made in Mexico. No shaft play. The sort of thing that would have been £1,600 to "2,000 new when people bought them in boxes with warranty cards rather than in conversations over workbenches.

To add to the theatre, I had spotted another Garrett in Chichester for 200 quid. Either a GT2560R or a GT2860R, the advert cheerfully unsure which. No obvious part numbers. Rebuilt “a few years ago”. Not used since. With the usual crack by the wastegate post. Cheap for a reason. The automotive equivalent of “possibly Labrador, possibly horse”.

Joe, by contrast, did not just wipe the oil off when the 1.6 tried to redecorate the engine bay. He had the turbo professionally inspected and dynamically balanced. There was even a German report from TurboService Berlin to prove it. Proper serial number on the sheet. Proper balancing graph. Spun to well over 100,000 rpm on a machine that knows what it is doing, not on a forum thread.

Which rather undermines the chap who thought 400 quid and a sense of urgency would seal the deal.

What made it better was that Joe did not just take the money and vanish. He started talking injectors. Flow rates. Sensible duty cycle margins. What works on a BP4W and what does not. He suggested a fuel injector specification that actually aligned with the power target, then said to tap him any time if I needed advice. Which, frankly, you do not always expect from someone in his twenties selling performance parts. Petrolhead, yes. Forum parrot, no.

You stand there looking at a 1.6 that lost a head gasket to enthusiasm and think: on that engine, it was too much. On a 1.8 Mazda MX-5 engine in a Triumph GT6, it is exactly where it should be.

You drive home with a Disco Potato in the boot, a German balancing report folded in the passenger seat, and the quiet sense that sometimes Marketplace is not a swamp at all. Sometimes it is just a young bloke in South Wales who knows what he is selling, knows what it is worth, and is not daft enough to knock 300 quid off because someone is ready to collect.

Oil all over his engine bay. None in mine. Yet.