Bloodsports

The Badminton (Beaufort) crowd were out again yesterday, all pageantry and plumes, while a fox flung itself into traffic in raw panic. My wife saw the reality – not countryside tradition, not noble sport, just a terrified animal running for its life because a pack of hounds was somewhere behind it. You could practically smell the fear on the air.

And we’re expected to swallow the usual claptrap about trail hunting and heritage. They love that word, heritage. It hides a multitude of sins. But heritage is precisely the point, just not in the way they intend. Fox hunting didn’t spring from farmers fretting about hens. It was never pest control. That justification is a late Victorian retrofit, invented when the urban public began to see the spectacle for what it was. The real roots lie in the cavalry. Hunting was off season military drill for the officer class. Ride fast across unpredictable ground. Keep formation. Follow the horn. Jump the hedge. Break your neck if you must, but do it stylishly with a flask of port in your pocket. The fox was chosen not because it was the scourge of the henhouse, but because it ran long and provided a decent chase. Stag hunting came first. Foxes filled the training gap.

Which is why the modern protestations about “pest control” are so absurd. If pest control were the point, they wouldn’t have spent centuries breeding foxes, maintaining coverts, and shaping the landscape to ensure a healthy supply. It is a sport masquerading as necessity, and the mask slips every time a frightened fox ends up on a main road while the field trots along behind.

So the obvious answer remains the simplest. If they want to ride, they must have independent oversight. A council appointed observer with a body cam, paid for by the hunt, tracking exactly what the hounds do. No observer, no riding. If they are as law abiding as they claim, they should welcome it. Police body cams exist for the same reason. Transparency protects the innocent and exposes the guilty.

Cue the outrage. It will destroy rural jobs. Stables will close. Kennels will shut. The countryside will fall into ruin without a gentleman in pink galloping across it. But livelihood is not a moral shield. Livelihoods were lost on the abolition of slavery. Entire industries built on exploitation vanished because they deserved to. The fact that someone profits from something does not grant it divine right to continue.

The truth is simpler. The hunt’s economic halo is flimsy. Most of the jobs they boast about would exist with or without the hounds. Farming does not collapse because a fox isn’t torn apart. Villages don’t wither because a whipper in hangs up his horn. And if any rural economy genuinely depends on driving wildlife into traffic, then the problem is far deeper than any ban could cause.

Independent oversight wouldn’t destroy hunting; it would expose it. And that is precisely why hunts fear it. Strip away the myths, and what remains is not tradition, not pest control, not some noble defence of livestock. It is cavalry practice that survived into the twenty first century by pretending to be something else. And the fox running under a car is the clearest proof of all that the disguise no longer works.

Refugees - a Solution

Labour's knee-jerk reaction to Reform on refugee policy has made me think long and hard about solutions.

Like it or not, we are living under the shadow of a Farage government. Not a thought experiment. Not a social media scare story. A real political possibility. If Reform keeps scooping up the angry and the disillusioned, and Labour misjudges the mood by even a few degrees, we could wake up with Nigel Farage in No 10 and a cabinet that looks like the comment section of a tabloid. That is the hard edge to this whole debate, and it forces choices that no one relishes.

Farage’s supporters ignore every contradiction, every fantasy cost, every clue about who he really serves. None of that matters to them while they are riding the emotional wave. That is why he is dangerous now and doomed later. And that is precisely why Labour’s strategy is a delaying action. They are holding the line until Farage does what he always does and collapses under scrutiny, giving the country the space to build the asylum system that actually works.

So when people claim Labour is simply following Farage on asylum and immigration, I have to confront the uncomfortable reality. Yes, they are echoing some of his lines. And yes, I dislike it. But I also understand the battlefield they find themselves on. Brexit taught us the modern rule of politics: he who shouts loudest and stirs the most aggravation usually seizes the terrain. The careful voice gets drowned out by the bloke with a slogan and a grievance.

Against that backdrop, asylum seekers have become a national pressure point. The numbers do not justify the panic. Set against Europe per thousand of population, we are nowhere near the avalanche people insist we are facing. From a racism point of view, the whole thing is depressingly predictable. Nevertheless, it has become the issue on which people project every insecurity they have about the country. Once that happens, reason gets shoved to the back of the cupboard.

This is where Labour’s approach starts to look less like conviction and more like a military manoeuvre. In strategic terms, what they are attempting is a delaying action. A fighting withdrawal. They are yielding a little rhetorical ground to prevent a full breakthrough by Farage. It is not noble and it is not elegant, but it is recognisable. You hold the line just firmly enough to stop the enemy charging through, while buying time to reinforce the real position elsewhere. In political terms, that means stopping Reform from hitting critical mass while creating space for a better, long term solution to take shape.

Because managing the noise is not the same as solving the problem. The real answer lies in building a modern, regionalised asylum system that treats refugee flows as a shared responsibility rather than a national panic. Instead of each country shouting at the one next door, you divide the world into coherent regions and agree fair mechanisms for processing, funding and resettlement. Burden shared by population, GDP and capacity. Funding flowing in reverse proportion to pressure. A rules based insurance scheme rather than a permanent political battlefield.

Of course, none of that can be built overnight. You are rewriting parts of the UN Refugee Convention, which was designed for a world that no longer exists. You are wrestling with governments that will swear blind they care while doing everything possible to avoid responsibility. It will take years. The diplomatic pushback will be immense. That is the reality of global reform.

Which means I have to accept something I do not like: Labour’s stopgap is not the solution. It is the tactic required to prevent a far worse outcome. We cannot build a regional model if the country hands the machinery of government to Farage and the professional grievance merchants who orbit him. If that happens, the vulnerable get crushed and any hope of sane asylum reform is torpedoed for a generation.

So yes, I resent Labour’s short term posture. I dislike the mimicry. I dislike giving even an inch to panic that is not rooted in facts. But I dislike the idea of a Farage government far more. If holding the line now, using a strategic delaying action, is the price of preventing that catastrophe, then I understand why they have taken it.

The long term work is building the regional system. The immediate work is stopping the demagogues from taking power long enough for the adults to get on with it. That is the battlefield as it stands. A short term fighting withdrawal to protect the ground on which the real solution must be built.

Until then, we are trapped in the age of the megaphone, trying not to let the loudest voice become the only one that counts.

Friend of GB News

I mentioned last week that I have been algorithmically anointed as a Friend of GB News. Not through any conscious effort of my own, you understand, but because some marketing bot decided I looked like the sort of chap who might enjoy a pint with Patrick Christys and nod along earnestly while he tells me he is my only hope in this dark and fallen world.

As a result, an email appeared in my inbox today. A heartfelt missive from Patrick himself, thanking me for taking precious time out of my day to watch his show. Touching, except for the minor inconvenience that I do not watch his show. Still, the sentiment was there. In the same way a phishing scam is technically a letter.

Patrick then embarked on a long explanation of why GB News is so terribly important. Not important in the old fashioned journalistic sense, where you report facts and hold power to account. No, important in the sacred mission to represent the unrepresented masses. These are apparently hordes of disenfranchised Britons who only ever talk about three things. The pub. The dinner table. And the mysterious point where both meet the word mate.

GB News, we are assured, is the only channel that listens to these people. The rest of the media has apparently spent decades treating them like dirt. No evidence is required. It is simply true because Patrick says so, and he has the earnest tone of a man who knows how to carry indignation with a straight back.

He gave examples. The Winter Fuel Payment cut was ridiculous, he told me. GB News rode to the rescue by going into the frozen wastelands of County Durham and listening to pensioners. They humanised the issue. This apparently forced the Government to act. Quite an achievement, given that every other media outlet also reported it, every opposition politician shouted about it, and every charity wrote briefing papers thicker than a church Bible. Still, in the mythology of GB News, it was their camera crew alone who moved the levers of power.

Then he moved on to British farmers and inheritance tax. He assured me that GB News would go in to bat for British farming. Stirring stuff. You half expect him to tack on Jerusalem. It is not clear what the actual policy solution is, but that does not matter. The point is that someone, somewhere, must be blamed. Preferably someone in London.

What really struck me was Patrick’s method. He constantly asked what we, the people, are talking about in our front rooms. What we want to hear. What we want on our screens. A journalist who asks what the audience wants to hear has already left journalism and wandered into motivational speaking. The news is supposed to tell you what is true, not what keeps you warm inside.

But of course the punchline arrived right on cue. After all this rustic sincerity, he invited me to join GB News as a paying member, for a mere fiver. Make sure we are here to stay, he said. It turns out the People’s Channel is only the People’s Channel if the people put their hand in their pocket.

In short, the entire email was a curious mix of flattery, grievance, and a cash register. A sort of political QVC, where the product is indignation, and the guarantee is that no uncomfortable fact will ever intrude on the flow.

All because I was algorithmically categorised as a Friend of GB News. Proof, if it were needed, that artificial intelligence still has a sense of humour.

Changing Your Mind

We humans like to imagine ourselves as rational creatures. Masters of logic. Champions of reason. Alpha apes with spectacularly big brains, effortlessly slicing through life with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. Then someone points out we’ve been confidently spouting utter nonsense for the past ten years and what happens? The calm, intelligent façade falls away and the panic sets in.

No one wants to admit they’ve made a colossal cock-up. The ego rallies its defences like a wounded general in a bunker, screaming “Hold the line,” while the truth strolls in waving receipts.

Take Brexit, climate change, or that “slimming tea” your mate swore by. Facts pile up like abandoned shopping trolleys in a canal, but admitting error would be far too traumatic. So we double down. “It hasn’t been done properly.” “Scientists are in on it.” “I lost weight in my dreams, so it counts.” Anything to avoid muttering the terrifying words: “I might have been wrong.”

The human brain does backflips to protect its dignity. We’re capable of landing robots on Mars, yet the simple act of saying “fair point” makes us seize up like a 1970s Austin Allegro attempting to start on a frosty morning.

The irony is that updating your beliefs is the most intelligent thing you can do. Instead, we defend a mistake as though it’s a family heirloom. We polish it, display it proudly, maybe write an angry Facebook post or three, and shout at anyone who suggests throwing it in the bin where it belongs.

So yes, we’re absurd. Gloriously so. The species that can split the atom and also say, with a dead straight face: “I haven’t changed my mind and I never will, because that would mean my brain has worked.”

If aliens ever land, they will observe our behaviour carefully and reach the only sensible conclusion: clever technology, shame about the software.

The Erosion of Institutional Trust

Right – let’s talk about the Farage school of public enlightenment, where every question mark is a crowbar and every shrug hides a wrecking ball. “What aren’t they telling us?” he asks, eyebrows arched like semaphore flags spelling mistrust. He doesn’t need to say what they’re hiding – the beauty of it is that you get to fill in your own fantasy. A secret migrant hotel under Buckingham Palace? EU officials storing wind turbines in Dover? Civil servants plotting to ban St George’s Day? The details don’t matter; only the feeling does.

And if the facts are finally published, dull as dishwater and exactly what anyone sensible expected, that’s just proof of the cover-up. “They had to tell us once we started asking questions!” You can almost hear the victory pint being poured.

The police, terrified of becoming the next culture-war football, now oblige by releasing the ethnicity of every suspect as though it were a plot twist. It’s never enough. If the accused is white, “they’re hiding the real story.” If he isn’t, “they tried to keep it quiet until we forced them.” It’s the circular logic of grievance – no matter what happens, the mob was right all along.

Then come the statistics. Present them with ONS data showing that asylum numbers are lower than a decade ago, or that most small-boat arrivals are genuine refugees, and the reply is instant: “If you can believe these statistics.” If hospital waiting lists go down – “massaged figures.” If they go up – “proof Labour can’t run the NHS.” Climate scientists? “Fiddling the thermometers.” Economists? “In the pay of Brussels.” Judges? “Left-wing activists in wigs.” The only people beyond suspicion are blokes in pubs who “just know how things really are.”

Farage himself is a master of this linguistic judo. “I’m not saying the BBC is lying,” he’ll announce on a channel with ‘GB’ in its name, “but it does make you wonder, doesn’t it?” He did it with the NHS – “Where’s all the money going?” With Covid – “Why weren’t we told the truth?” With net zero – “Who’s really profiting from it?” Each question plants a seed that grows into an oak of paranoia watered by social media and fertilised with pure conjecture.

Meanwhile, institutions – civil service, police, even the Bank of England – twist themselves into transparency knots trying to disprove allegations that were never concrete to begin with. Announce an inquiry too soon, and you’re “covering up fast.” Wait for evidence, and you’re “dragging your feet.” It’s like being interrogated by a drunk who insists your silence proves guilt and your speech proves guiltier.

And this is how language becomes acid. The far-right populist doesn’t shout “Down with democracy!” He smiles and says, “I’m only asking questions.” He doesn’t claim “The statistics are lies”; he purrs, “If you can believe them.” He doesn’t attack judges directly; he sighs, “Funny how these rulings always go one way, isn’t it?” It’s plausible deniability dressed as plain speaking.

The result? A public so marinated in mistrust that when a civil servant quotes a spreadsheet, half the room checks under the table for Soros. Trust evaporates, reason collapses, and up steps the man of “common sense,” pint aloft, offering to bulldoze the whole apparatus of expertise. It’s like watching someone set fire to a library because one book had a typo.

So next time you hear “What aren’t they telling us?” try answering, “Usually, the boring bits you wouldn’t listen to anyway.” When someone sneers “If you can believe these statistics,” smile sweetly and say, “I’ll take peer review over pub review any day.” And when the flag-draped truth-teller demands gratitude for exposing yet another “cover-up,” remember: it isn’t truth he’s selling – it’s suspicion in a pint glass, and the first round’s on you.

Refugee Policy

Refugee policy in this country has been turned into a Punch and Judy show, with the right screaming about invasions and Labour so terrified of looking soft that it is drifting towards a 20 year probation period that no sane person could defend. Twenty years is not policy – it is a sentence. It is the sort of thing you impose when you want the headlines, not the outcome.

But there is a line that is firm, fair and workable, and it sits nowhere near this punitive nonsense. Five years of protection makes sense. Conflicts rarely settle in two or three. Let someone breathe, work, recover, learn the language and stabilise. And if their home country genuinely becomes safe in that period – not cosmetically safe, not safe on a minister’s spreadsheet, but actually stable – then yes, return is reasonable. That is what the Refugee Convention envisaged and it is what most people, left or right, consider common sense.

What you cannot do is pretend that someone who has lived here for the thick end of a decade is still some sort of temporary visitor. By the time you reach seven years – certainly by ten – people have roots. Jobs. Children in school. Community ties. Tax records longer than most MPs manage to keep a job. At that point, the idea of booting them out just to appease whichever demagogue is shouting loudest is not firmness. It is spite. And spite is a stupid way to run a country.

The right loves to bleat that refugees do not integrate. Then, when they do integrate, the right wants them treated as disposable anyway. Heads they win, tails you lose. A system designed around that kind of hypocrisy is doomed to fail. A system designed around stability – quick decisions, proper early returns, and settlement once roots are planted – actually works.

This is where the sensible line sits. Five to seven years before review. Settlement once someone has genuinely built a life. No twenty year limbo designed to keep tabloids happy. No fantasy mass deportation circus. Just a steady, adult framework that blunts the right without wrecking families or creating a permanent underclass.

Stop performing toughness. Start governing. That is the difference between a functioning asylum policy and the theatre that has passed for one in Britain for too long.

The Metropolitan Elite

The phrase metropolitan elite, which has its origins between 2010 and 2015, gets thrown around so casually these days you would think it refers to an actual organised caste instead of a fictional bogeyman cooked up by columnists who need a cartoon villain. It is one of those empty political labels that survives only because it is never defined. The moment you try to pin it down, it disintegrates like a cheap biscuit in hot tea.

Who exactly are these people. Apparently anyone who lives within twenty miles of a Pret, has read a book that is not about World War Two tanks, or once expressed a view that did not come from a tabloid front page. The supposed elite includes broadcasters, teachers, nurses, civil servants, academics, actors, lawyers, charity workers, scientists, students and almost anyone who has ever taken the train into London for work. In other words, the overwhelming majority of the national workforce.

It is not an elite. It is just people.

The irony, of course, is that the politicians and pundits who shout metropolitan elite the loudest are the only ones who actually fit the bill. Multi millionaires. Hedge fund cheerleaders. Think tank creatures funded by offshore donors. Media hosts on six figure salaries. Party leaders who have never taken a night bus in their lives. People whose entire careers are built on telling ordinary voters that the real enemy is the bloke who presents the weather on Radio 4.

It is political misdirection of the purest kind. You take a handful of professions that require education and responsibility, and you pretend they form a secret club running the country. Then you use that invented enemy to divert attention from the actual elites. The ones who bankroll political parties. The ones who sit on boards. The ones who attended Eton or Harrow. The ones who write Brexit betting strategies while telling the rest of the country it is about sovereignty.

When Robbie Gibb uses the term, it means anyone in the BBC who does not match his ideological spreadsheet. When Reform UK uses it, it means anyone who knows how to spell. When the right wing press uses it, it means anyone who is not paid by the right wing press.

It is a catch all insult aimed at anyone who thinks for themselves. And it succeeds because it allows people to imagine a shadowy cabal instead of admitting that their problems are caused by decisions taken in Westminster, not by a junior producer in Broadcasting House.

If you really want to see the genuine elite, look at who owns the newspapers. Look at who funds political parties. Look at who gets peerages. Look at who pays lobbyists. Look at who cashed in on the Truss budget while mortgages exploded. That is your elite. Not the woman on the Victoria line reading a novel.

The metropolitan elite is not a description. It is a coping mechanism. A way of avoiding responsibility by pretending that the country is run by a cabal of vegans with tote bags, rather than by the same billionaire interests who always have their hand on the tiller.

It is a vacuous term because it was designed to be. If it ever meant anything coherent, it could be disproved. So its power lies entirely in its vagueness. It is political fog. Thick enough to hide the real puppeteers. Thin enough for the tabloids to shine a torch through.

The elite are not in the metropolis. They are in the boardrooms, the trust funds, the donor lists, and the discreet corners of the Carlton Club.

The rest is theatre.

Friend of GB News

It began because Flipboard, that blissfully neutral magpie of an app, kept tossing GB News agitation pieces into my feed. Not because it thinks I am a fan, but because it serves everything from NASA to nutters without discrimination. And since I am pathologically unable to walk past a GB News comment section without sprinkling facts like salt on slugs, I kept clicking. Not once, but repeatedly. Several days of gentle, methodical myth demolition. And that, apparently, was enough for the GB News algorithm to decide I was one of the faithful. Not a critic. Not a saboteur. A friend.

From that point on the absurdity wrote itself. I wander into their comment threads like a bloke inspecting dry rot, drop a statistic here, a legal principle there, and wander out. Anyone paying attention would notice I am busy dismantling the narrative plank by plank. But their algorithm sees a flurry of comments and concludes I must be a devoted disciple. It cannot distinguish applause from arson. To a machine that equates engagement with adoration, an exterminator must look like a rat enthusiast.

So GB News now thinks I am part of the tribe. The irony is almost operatic. I explain that Reform’s deportation wheeze is physically impossible, or that Brexit lined the pockets of hedge funds rather than ordinary people, or that Trump’s threat to sue the BBC for defamation is legal fantasy of the highest order, especially when the BBC is one of GB News’s favourite attack targets. I drop that in for good measure, because nothing delights them more than bellowing about bias while flogging their own. And the system rewards me for my supposed enthusiasm. It files every corrective comment under loyal support, because that is what happens when opinion is given the same status as truth.

The algorithm does not recognise dissent. It just counts clicks and claps its little digital hands. By its logic, telling the barman the beer tastes like pond water means you are a regular.

So yes, after days of calmly dropping facts into their echo chamber, GB News has inducted me as a Friend. I await the badge. Perhaps even a merit certificate for outstanding services to accidental satire.

Meanwhile I will carry on doing what I have been doing all along, turning up in their comments, pointing out reality like a man tapping a cracked window with his finger, while the algorithm beams proudly, convinced I am one of them.

And the crowning irony is this, their presenters are so easily baffled by experts that even the algorithm would blush for them.

I allegedly get some benefits from being a Friend of GB News, but I've yet to determine what they are.

Marketing vs Physics

There I was, mug of tea in hand, when the television assaulted me with yet another miracle of modern “British innovation” – a heated clothes rack. A woman beamed with evangelical joy as she draped a family’s laundry over what looked suspiciously like a towel rail on stilts. “Dries a whole load for just six pence an hour!” she chirped, as if she’d personally cracked nuclear fusion.

Six pence an hour! A bargain, if only it worked. But even as the advert rolled, the laws of thermodynamics shuffled into the room, sighing like weary traffic wardens. I could almost hear them muttering: “Good grief, not this again.”

Because here’s the truth – the entire design is an act of physics denial. The heating element sits in the bars. You drape clothes over the bars. The bars warm the bit they touch – and absolutely nothing else. The rest of the garment, hanging limp below, might as well be in a cave. Meanwhile the warm air, doing what warm air does, rises cheerfully away from the soggy fibres and heads straight for the ceiling, leaving your jumper to stew in its own humidity like a damp monk’s habit.

I can picture the product meeting. Some bright spark must have said: “Why don’t we heat the very spot least exposed to air circulation?” And everyone nodded. “Brilliant! Let’s ensure 95 per cent of the fabric gets no heat at all. The other five per cent can boil gently while remaining wet.” Cue applause and a limited-time TV offer.

It’s a masterclass in misplaced optimism. All the energy goes into warming the ceiling, while your clothes hang there looking like drowned flags. The only things that dry properly are your patience and your bank balance.

There’s a grim irony in the idea that you’re “saving the planet” by replacing a 1 kWh tumble dryer with a 300 W rack you must run all night. Yes, it’s cheaper per hour – in the same way that walking to Scotland is cheaper than flying, provided you don’t value time, sanity or a spine.

And of course they always show it in a spotless home, not the fogged-up greenhouse you’ll actually create. After three hours the room hits 100 per cent humidity, your windows drip like a rainforest canopy, and every spider in the house starts migrating towards the drier air in the fridge.

If you really want your laundry dry, buy a heat-pump tumble dryer. It’s faster, cheaper and actually obeys the basic principles of physics. Or use the unheated rack with a fan and a dehumidifier – a combination that costs less and doesn’t require you to outwit entropy.

But please, don’t fall for the glowing promise of the “Rapid Pro” or whatever the latest marketing fantasy calls itself. It’s not rapid, and it’s only pro at one thing – converting electricity into smug advertising copy.

I switched off the telly, muttered “you can’t cheat evaporation”, and took another sip of tea. Somewhere in a lab, a physicist wept quietly into a warm, damp shirt.

Ideology vs Dogma

Ideology should be a sign that a person has thought things through. It ought to mean they have a philosophy of what makes a good society and a coherent way of getting there. Sadly, the word has been dragged through the gutter by people who treat ideology as a football scarf. Tribal colours, chanted slogans, and no interest in questioning whether the team has already lost.

Politicians often insist they are “pragmatists” rather than “ideologues.” It sounds reassuring. No wild schemes. No extremism. Yet scratch the surface and you find the same old prejudices dressed up as common sense. They are not free of ideology. They just deny having one so they never have to justify it.

Dogma is what gives ideology its bad reputation. Dogma demands obedience. It punishes curiosity. It tells you that the leader is always right and the critics are traitors. That is how you end up with disastrous policies defended long after the wreckage is obvious; Brexit being Exhibit A. A proper ideology would look at the evidence, see the damage, and adjust course. Dogma simply shouts louder.

So ideology is not the enemy. Unquestioning loyalty is. Ideology says, “Here is what I believe, tell me if I’m wrong.” Dogma says, “Here is what I believe, and if you disagree, there is something wrong with you.”

Ideology should be a sign of a mind in motion. Dogma is the sign of a mind closed for business.