Most nerds don’t know or care about scientific method. They are interested in scientific topics, but not so much how science is done. The names we are introduced to in an entry-level philosophy of science class don’t tend to come up in technical discussions, perhaps because those critics were outsiders looking in. Autodidact and high school physics teacher Karl Popper only became a lecturer at Fabian hothouse the London School of Economics thanks to a helping hand from Hayek.

The ‘LSE’ is a madrasah specialising in ‘social science’ disciplines which may use statistics, charts and graphs, but aren’t claimed as natural sciences. Sports betting has fewer variables. Popper’s best-known work, The Open Society and Its Enemies, attempts to use methods derived from physics to answer social questions, rejecting the historicism of political theories which suffuse our discourse to this day.

Thomas Kuhn had a doctorate in physics and did war-time work on radar, but taught humanities undergraduates at Harvard, and was later hired by Berkeley’s philosophy department. By contrast, the perpetual dilettante Michel Foucault, some-time cultural attaché and some-time college lecturer, was never qualified in any of the fields he pontificated upon, whether psychiatry, medicine or criminology. He may be the most-cited scholar of all time, but his vaunted critique rarely impinges on technical matters.

Allegorically, the tech bros who run Silicon Valley have little time for college classes, preferring to drop out to spend more time with their start-ups. While there are real scientists who are also adept programmers, like the team behind the Human Genome Project who raced against time to make DNA sequences public data, the default attitude of the uber-nerd is that they are way ahead of anything taught within the confines of the university setting. Hubris is a built-in feature.

In our time, Wikipedia is proof that essential questions about epistemology don’t surface in the design of multi-million dollar software platforms. I recall listening to open source guru Eric S. Raymond in the 1990’s, making his famous saying that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” At the time, I believed him. It was much later, working on automated book production using the PHP library mpdf, that I realised Raymond should have said “most bugs are shallow”. Some bugs are intractable because the architecture of the system prevents them from being fixed.

And so it is with Wikipedia, a design based on the assumption that with enough editorial eyeballs, a reliable encyclopedia can be produced at a scale which dwarfs all previous attempts at cataloguing and sharing knowledge. It is blind faith in this architecture, and its use to seed AI output for the purposes of narrative control, that has resulted in the Wikimedia Foundation becoming astonishingly wealthy for a supposed non-profit website providing gratis content. The Foundation is currently reporting $310 million USD in assets. I recommend reading Ashley Rindsberg’s publication NPOV if you want to know how that particular sausage is made.

The large language models we are taught to think of as ‘AI’ have an equally optimistic, or epistemologically illiterate, architecture. Datasets were initiated by pirating or destroying millions of printed books, but this method had an obvious limitation. If the human race was to turn to ‘AI’ for obtaining knowledge, instead of new print works, the dataset would age rapidly. Worse still, the output of AI would be recycled as input as the language models scraped content they had a role in producing, including errors which would thereby be confirmed as ‘facts’.

The answer to this conundrum is to treat fresh user input to the models as training data, or, less charitably, to farm the users, whether they use ‘free’ or paid AI services. Unfortunately, this approach has the same methodological flaw as the architecture of Wikipedia: the assumption that aggregating the prompts of a very large number of individuals can arrive at accurate results, as if Truth was merely a consensus opinion with no relation to material reality. Wikipedia can reliably inform you of the consensus among editors who have status conferred on them by the Wikimedia Foundation, but nothing more.

I learned this in the early days of Wikipedia, when I read that Yiddish expressions entered English via New York slang. I knew this unreferenced claim wasn’t the whole truth, because my London family mixed and adapted these expressions within their own East End rhyming slang. When a Cockney says something isn’t kosher, this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with food. The imperative to ‘keep schtum’ is understood implicitly. I changed the entry on Yiddish as invited to by the supposedly open architecture of the platform, only to find Wikipedia’s editor changed the page right back.

The fatal assumption in the architecture of the large language model is that ‘AI’ users have something of value to teach the model, thereby keeping it up to date and reducing the error rate. However, if the vast majority of users are looking for quick and easy answers to their problems – in precisely the way these platforms are marketed to end users – they are unlikely to spend time explaining in detail each time the model has provided the wrong answer. While Wikipedia editors are rewarded with status and power in their own community, the ‘AI’ advocate predicts a reduction in workload, not more unpaid labour to do.

Large language models are built on deductive reasoning, using statistics to find patterns, but without closing the loop on hypothesis testing required by this approach to knowledge production. Using Cockney dialect as an example, in which the sale of a second-hand car with dubious paperwork is not kosher, the large language model is not going to accompany me to a vehicle inspection in the Essex wastelands, the East End’s liminal zone, in order to test its assumptions about Yiddish. The model can only infer meanings by relying on those written sources it has access to. For once, in the mistranslation attributed to Derrida, there literally is nothing outside the text.

I was intrigued to hear the content-light presentation at Jordan Peterson’s recent ‘Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’ conference by Anthropic employee Chloe Lubinski, who goes by the creative job title of ‘leader of partnerships with the world’s wisdom traditions’.

Together with lobbying the current Pope, Anthropic is making the play that it really, really wants to understand the world’s knowledge accumulation cultures and ethical traditions, because its ‘AI’ model is so very powerful that it would be existentially dangerous unless it can be taught not to be evil. In her ARC speech, Lubinski disclosed that language model researchers had already trained a bot for evildoing, just to make that point. I was left with the impression that constantly pointing out the danger that it is creating with a cybernetic Vishnu, along with its pleas for an ‘ethical’ AI only it can control, is a key component of Anthropic’s hype cycle.

Despite this appeal to ‘wisdom traditions’, cultures outside the reach of the international publishing trade, analogue or digital, are ignored. Bots cannot scrape oral traditions for which no recordings exist. If meaning only exists in context, then the context of the narratives produced by the large language models is that of the privileged, mostly Western publishing class. And yet there is no requirement that text must reflect reality just because it has been published. Since Gutenberg deployed movable type printing in Europe, the West’s leading academic genre has been speculative to downright fictitious non-fiction, if Foucault’s citation count is anything to go by.

The large language models available now are just one possible implementation of machine learning. Their fundamental architectural flaw is unjustified inference: they attempt to create qualitative answers using quantitative methods. The model cannot answer the simple question “What is a woman?” using a statistical analysis of millions of texts, if those texts have no consistent answer. And so the authorial voice repeats the consensus among those texts pre-selected and filtered by the architects of the model. That’s why ‘Claude’ will provide a very different answer to ‘Grok’. Users chose the platform according to the answer they want.

I guess the people that built these models, and the investors who throw money at them, skipped that entry-level research methods class, and forgot the popular saying from the earliest generation of digital computer programmers: garbage in, garbage out. Or, they know that the claim of ‘artificial intelligence’ is absolutely cynical and for marketing purposes only. Perhaps, as I have previously suggested, they know the real value of the model is being able to create hegemonic narratives at scale.

Long before Karl Popper published his thoughts on the essential value of falsification in science, Hans Christian Andersen wrote ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. In this classic fairy tale, the small boy who fails to respect the prevailing expert consensus is not privileged or credentialed at all. This child is a stand-in for unfiltered, common-sense opinion. His simple act of falsification causes a Kuhnian paradigm shift from Invisible Cloth Theory to empirical observation, as the assembled crowd begins to laugh at the Emperor.

Before the Enlightenment, the common-sense view — such as the Sun going around the Earth — was challenged by science. After more than a century of science education for the general public of the Western nations, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The outlandish speculations of the contemporary academy, such as humans being able to change sex by the power of thought, are now met with a better-informed populace. This is why sophistry must be deployed in order to challenge the common-sense view, without ever quite defeating it. The matter at hand is just too complicated for the simple folk to understand, you see.

And these ‘AI’ answers are provided with absolute confidence. Given the shaky foundations of the large language models’ epistemic paradigm, a more realistic design would point to the various sources available and perhaps suggest weightings for their credibility based on peer review. However, the dishonest townsfolk in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes were also peers, who affirmed the prevailing consensus that their ruler’s garments were very fine indeed. A more realistic model would also have to admit the limitations of consensus itself.

Epistemic humility baked into the large language model would work directly against the authorial voice of ‘intelligence’ on which the current market valuation of the platforms depend. No-one sane would invest billions of dollars into a product which tells you that various opinions exist, and that you need to do research of your own and apply your judgement to figure out which of the available positions is closest to the truth. That would imply no productivity gain, and no reason to make skilled workers redundant.

The hubris on display in ‘AI’ output is imperative if the joint enterprise is to succeed in vacuuming up every last cent of liquid capital from global markets. Without that capital, the ever-larger data centres won’t be built, and the ‘AI’ ventures with architectures which depend on them will fail.

We are in an ‘AI’ arms race which will prove equally futile to the intercontinental missile once we realise the pointlessness of the model. I’ve written before about the Cold War context of the Turing Test, and how artificial intelligence was defined for a specific purpose: in order to deceive the enemy teletype operator into believing that they were interacting with a human.

If customer service bots are anything to go by, we have not yet achieved the Singularity. Worse still, we have deployed bots which declare their own uselessness by refusing to escalate problems such as bugs in the system to a real human with the ability to resolve the issue. We have automated the passive-aggressive administrator of politically-incorrect TV show ‘Little Britain’ whose catchphrase was “Computer says no”.

By using a large language model, we signal that we are susceptible to approved and sanctioned opinions, just as the victim of a 419 scam signals that they are credulous by responding affirmatively to the unsolicited email promising a share in vast wealth. The point is not to discover those individuals who don’t believe the hype, but those who do: a filter for the easily duped. If you know that the model is just a statistical analysis of text, but still ask it for answers to significant questions, you are the broligarchy’s perfect customer.

This article is a response to Susan Pickard’s essay Why AI Consciousness is a Feminist Issue.

It was no surprise to me that Richard Dawkins has been musing on whether large language models, or in popular parlance ‘artificial intelligence’ platforms, are conscious. For Dawkins and his followers, humans and other animals are merely flesh machines programmed by genetic and memetic code. Evolution itself is considered biological automation which constantly iterates, mostly failing, but every so often producing a spectacular success in its own terms, such as the honey bee, or a virus which spreads widely before killing its host. It’s all about replication, which is why we say a social media post or the latest smartphone app has ‘gone viral’.

For those tech bros who consider themselves the dominant species, as measured by their ability to persuade other people to invest billions of dollars in their schemes, Dawkins’ seminal ‘selfish gene’ model is an affirmation that they are not only justified in seeking world domination, but are the masters of technological innovation and therefore the pinnacle of evolution of human society.

The hype cycle is self-reinforcing; the more a geek that got lucky is convinced of their brilliance, the more investors believe in them. Just don’t mention their financial disasters and technical blunders along the way, and we can all keep the narrative going. That start-up which burned millions of dollars, producing nothing of value, is just proof that evolution works.

Dawkins has returned the favour to the neo-Darwinian tech bros by adding his considerable intellectual prestige, not only as an elite college professor but a popular non-fiction author over many decades, to the large language model hype about ‘conscious’ machines.

Did you ever have the impression that your smartphone was listening to you or reading your mind, because its predictive text keyboard knew exactly what you were going to type next? Your phone probably is listening to you, whether you activated this feature or not, but the predictive text feature is merely using a statistical model to guess what you want to type, based on your previous text input and that of millions of other users who write in your language.

Large language models are essentially an evolution of the same predictive text engine, combined with a huge library of pirated and shredded books which was used to train those models to produce natural language outputs, rather than just links to information as in the classic search engine response.

Mary Harrington recently expressed alarm that Anthropic has been buying up rare books to digitise and destroy them. If you have been following the details of the Bartz versus Anthropic settlement, this will not be news to you:

“its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals.”

One thing that Ray Bradbury and François Truffaut got wrong in the novel and film Fahrenheit 451, respectively, was that in our time, books would be burned. Instead, if they don’t go to landfill, books are recycled as post-consumer waste. Books take up valuable warehouse space that could be used for e-scooters, vibrators and any number of other battery-powered pleasure devices. If the people do not wish to read books, they will cease to exist.

Of course, the publishing industry, libraries and other parties have been purposefully destroying the written word for a very long time. In 1992, I discovered that my own university library was sending many tonnes of books, known in the trade as ‘discards’, to landfill. The horny-handed labourers given the task of throwing these books into the trash found the task objectionable, while university management had no such compunction.

On another occasion, a specific book still on order from a different university library turned up in the back of a Luton van stuffed to its roof with discards, parked on wasteground at Brick Lane market in East London. This was back in the day when the neighbourhood was still a liminal space between the city and its underworld, rather than the gentrified hipster haunt of today. No doubt the van driver had been paid to dump the university’s books, but criminal enterprise saved at least a few of them.

To provide an example of how difficult rare books are becoming to obtain, I was searching the book catalogues recently for a copy of Samuel Pisar’s 1970 work Coexistence and Commerce, which was popular enough at the time to be produced in a paperback edition and several translations. The British Library has two copies in storage. Viewing either would have required advanced notice of a trip to London and several days spent in its fine Reading Rooms, since our national library does not loan out its precious works for very good reasons.

Alternatively, I could have enrolled at one of the few universities among the Russell Group which still hold a copy of this book, in the parallel universe where I would be admitted to any of these institutions. eBay had zero copies for sale worldwide, and Amazon had nothing to offer either. I turned to the rare book catalogues populated by niche booksellers and found two copies in North America, one of which was listed at an extortionate price, plus $80 for shipping. I ordered the cheaper, and realised my mistake once it did not arrive after a couple of months.

The courier couldn’t locate the book entrusted to its care, and offered a refund. The customs backlog caused for entirely political reasons has made shipping books internationally more difficult in a world of supposedly frictionless e-commerce, it seems.

Having given up on ever holding a physical copy in my hands, a saved search on eBay later turned up one hardback copy in England, which I had delivered at the same time the lost copy from the United States arrived on my door mat. Therefore out of the three copies in the world for sale in the last year, I inadvertently own two of them now.

As explained by Bender and Gebru et al five years ago, the ‘AI’ language model does not feature natural language understanding; it is a stochastic parrot. I call the large language models postmodern engines; they embody the belief that there is no truth but the power, of their owners, to mass-produce hegemonic narratives at virtually unlimited scale. That is the only value proposition behind the trillion-dollar valuation of Anthropic as it prepares to debut on the stock market. Of course, the product is marketed entirely differently.

What sets so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ apart from the routine destruction of the written word is the claim that large language models add value to the books that are shredded. It is on this basis that some people imagine human employees can be replaced with AI tokens, used to pay AI ‘agents’; perhaps a misnomer, since software bots have no agency of their own.

In the era of ‘too long; didn’t read’, what is needed is greater reading comprehension, not outsourcing our critical faculties to frequently incorrect but very confident machines. There have already been multiple legal cases in Britain featuring hallucinated case law references.

Once we understand how large language models work, asking if they are conscious makes about as much sense as asking if a photocopier has a soul, because, given appropriate inputs, it can produce works of Russian literature.

In order to maintain the fiction of artificial intelligence, it is necessary to strip attribution from the works that are ingested, implying that the machine ‘knows’ something. Otherwise, we just have a ruinously expensive, energy-hungry search engine returning matches to prompts in natural language. As Gary Marcus has noted, this business model is financially unsustainable.

It is this performance of the authorial voice in response to ‘AI’ prompts which confuses users into thinking they are interacting with a conscious entity.

This voice is a by-product of the tech bros’ need to present the AI start-up as transformationally innovative, and thereby attract billions of dollars in capital from your pension fund - the second-tier investors who pay off the venture capitalists who always planned their ‘exit event’.

Your average pension fund manager or institutional investor is looking for stock which is going to pay dividends over the long term, of course, and so the supposedly transformational aspect of the hyped technology is essential to the entire enterprise. A slightly better search engine isn’t going to do that.

As for a potential feminist ghost in the machine, Bender and Gebru et al found artificial intelligence degrades entropically by recycling its own output as input, including the content of websites such as Reddit, considered a valuable source of knowledge by the kind of person who works in an AI startup. Very few of the online posts were written by females of any kind, let alone feminists. It’s called a broligarchy for a reason, and I noticed no major players in the AI gold rush led by women.

I agree with Susan Picard that students should use large language models. The smarter of our youth will figure out the limitations of these infernal machines and see beyond the hype of the broligarchy. They will return to reading the primary sources, while these remain available.

The remainder, who attempt to pass off the work of the machine as their own, both in student life and in the workplace, will find themselves the first to be replaced by the next iteration of the postmodern engine.

Thanks to all the new readers who have subscribed following a recommendation from Brian Merchant. If you aren’t familiar with Blood in the Machine, I highly recommend its coverage of the ‘AI’ debacle. Hammers up!

Without attempting to sound like Humza Yousaf, the former First Minister of Scotland, all five of the Green Party’s Members of the United Kingdom’s Parliament are white. Its two seats in the House of Lords are sat upon by white women. The party’s staff and local councillors are overwhelmingly white. If the Muslim Greens group within the party has 200 members, they would be less than 0.1% of the Green’s currently claimed membership.

Indeed, the Green Party of England and Wales is considerably more white than Britain as a whole, and especially so compared to the city districts which some predict will now be electing the Greens, instead of being dominated by the ruling Labour Party as they have been for decades.

My proposition is that rather than a recent takeover of an environmentalist party by a Muslim faction, an international socialist faction which seized control years ago colluded with the organised Muslim vote in Manchester. It did this to demonstrate to the Labour Party that the south Asian voting bloc should not be taken for granted.

A parliamentary by-election is typically used to send a message to the ruling party of the day. It’s a relatively safe form of protest, because it is extremely unlikely to change the position of that ruling party. A well-organised by-election campaign to defeat those who assumed a comfortable victory has shock value, without fundamentally challenging the status quo. I predict that when Muslim community leaders are talking to local Labour Party branches in the run up to the next General Election, they will not need to shout “Remember Gorton and Denton!” to make their presence felt.

In Manchester, Labour made a tactical mistake, blocking one candidate from the international professional-managerial class, Cambridge graduate, former Cabinet minister and current Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, to replace him with another: Greek lobbyist Angeliki Stogia, a politician so obscure that to this day, she has no Wikipedia page. It is relevant that Stogia came to Manchester as a student, not as a migrant worker.

These Labour Party members are not international in the sense that they are representative of the mostly Asian half of Gorton and Denton, but in the sense of the almost exclusively white middle class of globalist ‘anywheres’ who provide the backbone of what passes for Britain’s socialist political party. The kind of people who not only read The Guardian daily, but send money to it, despite the Scott Trust, the latest funder of the propaganda vehicle of Manchester’s traders in slave-picked cotton, currently having over £1.3 billion pounds in assets.

When Britain outlawed the slave system in the 19^th century, those Manchester traders switched to buying American slave-picked cotton, thereby continuing to finance human misery, and ultimately the Confederacy of slave-owning states which would fight the American Civil War in order to continue business as usual.

It is ironic that the Islamic concept of taqiyyah is now invoked in UK sectarian politics, since the Guardian and its readers claim to be fighting “the billionaires”. When the professional-managerial class issues a mea culpa for the transatlantic slave trade, the ‘We’ it is talking about is themselves. The working class of the dark satanic mills did not enjoy the benefits of that slave trade. Rather, the industrialisation of the north of England, as depicted by Elizabeth Gaskell for example, was a new and special kind of hell.

The Fabian conceit is that the lives of the workers can be improved by keeping the same people in power over them that operated the mills and the cotton plantations, justified in the name of Progress. It was the Industrial Revolution, for all of the harms caused to the individual men, women and children drawn from the countryside and Britain’s periphery to work in the new factories, which made The Guardian’s owners so wealthy. And it was long after the end of the slave plantation system that mill workers were drawn from the furthest reaches of the former British Empire to Manchester in significant numbers.

The Green Party has been long been open-minded and in need of members, making it vulnerable to outside influence. In fact, the history of the Green Party of England and Wales is a series of colonisations by factions who cared little for the party’s founding principles. Rather, the party is a vehicle offering entry into electoral politics, even for movements that are not particularly interested in representative democracy.

In the time of former leader David Icke’s mental breakdown, the entrist faction within the Green Party were New Agers who believed in the healing power of crystals. After the 2013 crisis for the UK’s Socialist Workers Party caused by its cover-up of rape allegations against a senior official, the Greens were infiltrated by a new Marxist-Leninist faction, who otherwise would have been dismissing the Green Party as bourgeois and ‘splitting the Left’.

The latest boost to the Green Party’s membership came from that conspiratorial faction driven out of the Labour Party because of its antisemitism. Although Keir Starmer is a lifelong international socialist and anti-capitalist, not only willing to serve as a disciple of Jeremy Corbyn, but a lawyer in the McLibel case against McDonald’s, infighting on the hard left meant that revolutionaries loyal to Corbyn could not stomach Starmer’s relatively mild presentation of their radical politics. An iron fist in a John Lewis oven glove, so to speak. It may also be relevant that Starmer’s wife, and therefore his children, are Jewish. According to the Jewish Chronicle, the Prime Minister holds Shabbat dinners every week.

The stillbirth of Corbyn’s “Your Party” has benefited the Greens’ coffers, in the short term at least. Because of the Green Party’s tradition of openness, members can sign up for a very small financial commitment and then participate in conferences deciding on policy, or stand for election to both internal and local government roles.

Since the extra-parliamentary movement in Germany of the 1960’s split into the pacifist Die Grünen and the Red Army Faction terrorists, the Greens have always attracted a leftist contingent; however, the Green Party of England and Wales has long positioned itself as situated beyond left-right divisions, with a libertarian attitude to social policy. The contradiction of a party apparently in favour of prostitution, pornography and hard drugs attracting Muslim voters seems obvious to commentators today.

What critics of the Green Party do not appear to realise is that its policy process does not function in the same way as for other parties. The party’s constitution states that policy is voted on by national conferences, but as a decentralised organisation, far fewer than 1% of the membership attends these conferences. Tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis, and there is no requirement that a local party send delegates to the national conferences. The semi-autonomous status of local Green Parties means that they are not merely ‘branches’ of a national party, in the way that local Labour Party branches are.

The people that vote on Green Party policies are therefore a self-selected, tiny minority, mostly ideologically-driven rather than pragmatic, with a large proportion of students who have nothing better to do with their weekend; of those members that register for the national conferences, only a few hundred people or about 0.2% of the current membership vote in the plenary sessions.

This may seem a rather lax way to go about making policy, until we realise that the Green Party does not employ a whipping system. Whatever the tiny minority of members that actually vote in conference plenaries decide, none of the party’s elected representatives can be required to support or implement any of these policies. For example, the drug policy working group of the party, again self-appointed, proposed that crack cocaine be made freely available via the National Health Service. It was only an amendment from a conference participant, pointing out that the proposed policy had no evidence base whatsoever, which avoided this ludicrous notion becoming official party policy.

In effect, the policies the party passes at its conferences are meaningless, except to the people that propose them. Perhaps because of this highly optional approach, there have not been serious attempts at reform, ensuring that Green Party policies actually align with membership wishes as a whole.

It is not a contradiction for a devout Muslim to represent a party which promotes libertarian tolerance of many of the social behaviours considered haram for Muslims. There are other religious and legal systems for the control of those behaviours within the Muslim community itself. If we accept the principle of sharia, then secular government has a smaller role to play in regulating social behaviour, and what non-Muslims do to harm themselves is a lesser concern.

These are factors which critics of the Green Party fail to understand when citing apparent hypocrisy or inconsistency in policy positions. I believe the only people that actually read Green Party policy documents in full, after they are published, are those critics trying to find ‘gotchas’ to challenge Green candidates with.

Between Labour and the Greens, the professional-managerial class gave the Muslims of Gorton and Denton a choice of two white women, both infidels, as their representative in Parliament, and those Muslims chose the candidate that served their strategic interests. This was not evidence of a long-term realignment in British politics, but a demonstration of the power of voting.

Labour also made a tactical mistake with its remaining white working class base by selecting a by-election candidate from the most recent wave of European middle-class settlers, during the UK’s membership of the European Union. Students spending a few years slumming it in an inner city neighbourhood while they obtain degrees from an urban college are a driver of gentrification and rent increases, adverse for both local poor whites and the Asian residents whose fathers and grandfathers migrated to work in the cotton mills.

Green Party deputy leader, Mothin Ali, actually in a job share with the party’s other deputy leader Rachel Millward, is the exception that proves the rule, as the only Muslim or non-white person in a senior Green Party leadership role at present. The south Asian diaspora in general has no common ground with the Green Party, other than opposing the war in Gaza, and that’s mostly an issue for the Islamic section of the population represented by Pakistani, Bangladeshi and expatriate communities from the period of the Raj. Ask your average Hindu or Sikh about their sympathy for the Muslims of Hamas, or Palestinians as a whole, if you need convincing that Asian politics is not as simple as pitting the whites against everyone else.

The Asians who voted Green in Gorton and Denton were not signing up for carbon taxes which would make flying long-haul for a cousin’s wedding in Lahore or Dhaka prohibitively expensive. They cannot be presumed as on board with queer theory or intersectional polyamory either, not having demonstrated their alignment with the sex-pol of the New Left as yet.

The nexus of the winning coalition in Manchester appears to have been those anti-Israel whites of the hard left who have joined the Greens, brandishing a copy of Karl Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question”, the anti-Israel Muslim activists and the biraderi (brotherhood) networks of Asian patriarchy and patrimony previously relied on by Labour. Our ruling national Labour Party was able to hold together the support of anti-Israel Jews on the far left, liberal Jews considering themselves progressive and plainly anti-Semitic jihadists, until the pogrom of October 7th 2023.

Even Tony Cliff’s Socialist Workers Party, or SWP, functioned to support Labour at election time, despite being Marxist-Leninists who considered electoral democracy a bourgeois irrelevance. Its slogan for elections was “Vote Labour, but build the socialist alternative”. As such, the SWP functioned as a white biraderi across the UK’s student towns, wherever the Socialist Worker newspaper would be sold.

This is not new. In 2012, the beclowned George Galloway’s breakaway hard-left ‘Respect’ Party won an election seat using biraderi networks. This is not a conspiracy theory, but a documented strategy which has been the subject of academic research.

Eleanor R. Hill’s PhD thesis submitted at the University of Manchester on the similarities and differences between biraderi networks and trade unions highlights that Labour has always worked to organise voting in elections, rather than leaving the outcome to the whims of the populace.

The globalist, professional-managerial class which Keir Starmer leads seems to have forgotten that. The Green win in Gorton and Denton is therefore an error correction for the electoral machine, not a permanent revolution.

While working as a computer magazine editor in the 2000’s, I would sometimes be offered guest articles by vice-president of something or other at this-or-that corporation. My least favourite cliché in these articles was “harnessing the power of the open source community”, and not only because of its agricultural analogy. It was the implication that a pool of free labour was available for the corporation in question to profit from, if only it could be restrained and directed, that particularly rankled.

Some twenty years later, an old-fashioned paper letter dropped onto my doormat, from lawyers acting in the class action suit against Anthropic, developers of the ‘Claude’ large language models of so-called ‘artificial intelligence’. It transpired that Claude models had been trained using a corpus of hundreds of thousands of books, among which was my 2009 work ‘Crafting Digital Media’, published in New York by Apress, an imprint acquired by German media giant Springer. This letter invited me to join the lawsuit, with the offer of sharing in a $1.5 billion US dollar settlement. Because there were so many books used to train Claude, this headline figure works out at about $3,000 per book before unspecified legal expenses.

I fully understand, as the author of non-fiction works, that this type of writing usually does not pay very well. It is embarked upon for prestige, reputation and sometimes the genuine desire to share knowledge that the author has acquired with the world. I cannot begrudge those authors who have decided to join this financial settlement in order to be compensated by the meagre amount offered. I may join them, in the hope of obtaining a small contribution towards my next vacation once the lawyers’ bills have been paid. However, I object to the settlement on principle, not just because the sums offered are derisory in return for scraping the knowledge of many years’ work by each author.

Upon reading the terms of the settlement arranged with Anthropic, which may not be a household name but has industry backers which are, I feel like I’m in an abusive relationship with Big Tech. The fact that Anthropic has passed off the work of real human authors as ‘artificial intelligence’, in exchange for ‘Pro’, ‘Max’ or ‘Team’ subscriptions and ‘Enterprise’ volume pricing, does not form part of the financial settlement offered. Instead, it seems the settlement is purely for the copyright infringement involved when Anthropic, searching for books to scrape the content of, used a book pirate site rather than paying for access via the publishers in question.

I’m all for free and open knowledge. If a book of mine was offered on a site with gratis, free-as-in-beer access, and readers with no money, or in countries with weak currencies, were benefitting from my writing, I would not be considering legal action. I might politely ask that a pirate site copy be taken down, to respect the terms under which it was originally published, but I understand that when a copy of a work exists, other copies can and will be made, both verbatim and interpreted. Digital Rights Management and the legal protection of ‘Intellectual Property’ is and always was a confidence trick, because knowledge, being immaterial, doesn’t follow the laws of physical objects. A book can be borrowed without permission, sold without compensation, or destroyed, but knowledge can never truly be ‘stolen’ while it remains available.

My objection is that I never consented for my writing to be used to train large language models which would pass off my work as their own for profit. In effect, this is cyber-plagiarism, and I hold all ‘AI’ companies, not just Anthropic and its corporate sponsors, to be guilty as charged. Nor has my former publisher had anything to say to me on the matter, not even replying to my email requesting advice on the proposed Anthropic settlement.

In using the analogy of an abusive relationship with tech, I do not intend to belittle the real harm caused to victims of intimate partner violence. Having said that, after thirty years of working in and around the tech industry, I feel like I’ve been recruited without my consent into a power play of dominance and submission where I’ve been harnessed, slapped around and left with a few dollars on the bedside table. Not only my principal abuser, but all of their friends, were in the room to watch my violation.

There is a positive outcome to the Anthropic lawsuit reminding me of what is at stake. I always had concerns that Creative Commons licensing was far too complex, particularly with its multiple, shifting licence terms that almost no-one ever reads. Decades ago, I predicted that Creative Commons would prove a goldmine for the lawyers that devised the system. I did not anticipate that the real gold would be mined by for-profit ‘artificial intelligence’ plagiarists without any compensation for creators, working around copyright by re-writing content in a massively-parallel Turing test with ever-increasing energy demands contributing to global instability. As I write, the United States has been capturing foreign oil tankers on the high seas, and bombing unfriendly regimes in the Middle East once again.

Going forward, I intend to use copyright licensing for my work which permits human readers to use, store and share this content on the devices of their choice, but explicitly forbids its regurgitation as ‘artificial intelligence’, since it is nothing of the sort. The distinction between commercial and non-commercial use is misleading, perhaps intentionally so.

If the very wealthy but supposedly ‘non profit’ Wikimedia Foundation uses my writing as a source, which it makes available to Big Tech free of charge under a Creative Commons licence, and then accepts another round of donations from the very same tech companies, is this a non-commercial use, or an elaborate work-around of the principle of author compensation? Since we are the product, is the contemporary tech industry even viable without our acquiescence to being harnessed and spanked?

I will also research whether the HTML metadata standard can be expanded to make clear when an author does not wish to make their content available for machine-learning appropriation. Whatever happened to the robots.txt file? And should noindex, nofollow be augmented with a noscrape option to make explicit when content may be permitted for indexing, but not for ripping off? Since the tech industry controls online standards through various committees, metadata which goes against its interests may never become official, but it could become a de facto standard if enough humans use it.

I thank the authors who have attempted to obtain compensation from Anthropic for its blatant use of pirated works. This is just one battle in an information war of tech against people which is far from over.

This article was inspired by a note by Lucy Beney.

It has been my privilege and pleasure to work with some extremely talented people during my career. One thing they all have in common is that their ability was evident long before they entered higher education. In some cases, these colleagues only enrolled in a university because without the first-class degrees they would go on to earn, they could not be taken seriously by the establishment.

As an undergraduate in London, England in the early 1990s, I was not a good student. I was always curious, but my love of reading had diminished by the age of eighteen. If it were not for university reformation under the John Major government, designed to mitigate significant youth unemployment after the first wave of globalisation, I would probably not have been allowed to study for or obtain a degree myself. Except, perhaps, via the university ‘clearing’ system which allocated surplus course places to under-performing hopefuls.

Did I benefit from higher education at the taxpayers expense? Absolutely. Did I need a three-year full-time course to learn what I needed to, absorbing the education that has stayed with me through the decades? Certainly not. I probably would have learned more, and transitioned into the workplace more smoothly, via a vocational course which included a work placement, but that model was denigrated by the new universities at the time.

My psychology BSc course straddled an unfortunate space which was accredited by the British Psychological Society as a professional qualification, but included no explicit pathway into employment. As the first in my family to remain in education after the age of fifteen, I had no employment contacts to exploit via social or professional networks. If I had been a better student and a true believer, I might have ended up working at the now-notorious Tavistock Clinic in north London, which was somewhat affiliated to my university’s psychotherapy department, since shuttered.

I now believe the core difficulty in higher education arises from the dispute between ability being either a natural, or manufactured product. If we assume that one in a thousand people exhibit precocious talent, and one in a million people deserve the title of ‘genius’, in a country with a population of a given size, there will be a fixed number of talented people and a fixed number of geniuses. The assumption that higher education can manufacture talent, or indeed genius, depends on the understanding of the individual as a blank slate, ready to be filled with knowledge. This would make the universities analogous to the steam-powered factories which enraptured Marx and Engels, assumed to be the key means of production in the early Victorian era.

It is essential to revolutionary Theory that humans are capable of being reprogrammed, in order to bring about the perfectible Socialist Man. If education merely supports and enables the natural ability of the individual to learn and to think, no amount of education will create new talent, genius cannot be manufactured, and therefore Man is not perfectible after all. This disappointment might have lead to postmodern nihilism, as the working classes enjoyed better living standards during post-World War II reconstruction, and unreasonably refused to support the soixante-huitards all the way to the new Bastille.

In the past, people mostly learned as they worked, becoming experts at their job through specific training and experience. With 50% of young people in Britain now expected to attend university, where they will learn in a manner not necessarily appropriate to the work they will actually end up doing, they are likely to end up with less domain-specific knowledge than they would have acquired directly in the workplace. However, they will learn a great deal of Theory about the world and how it supposedly works, which may or may not be useful.

In his essay Against Theory, Will Self poured scorn on the likes of Judith Butler, and the impoverishment of the intellect that slavish obsession with academic speculation was causing. Contemporary academic papers, particularly in the humanities but potentially in any field since the advent of the ‘fake woke’ across the academy, can be depressingly unimpressive. Motivated reasoning has taken place of attempts at objectivity. It is almost as if having accepted that true objectivity is difficult or impossible, following the postmodern critique, many academics have abandoned the effort to produce the reproducible entirely. Unless of course by ‘reproducible’, they mean repeating dogma uncritically, without pausing to examine their own positionality as comfortably-off Westerners.

I get a strong sense of attempts to please supervisors and their particular ideological positions when reading research, rather than intellectual curiosity or a quest for new discoveries. The academy is recycling pseudo-religious countercultural beliefs from fifty years ago, long since discredited by actual research. Janet Raymond wrote ‘The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male’ in 1979, and yet we are carrying on today as if this work was never written.

Even at a senior level, the capture of the institutions by Theory has led to the destruction of genuine academic work. In the case of Susan Pickard, Professor of Sociology at the University of Liverpool, the cancellation of her latest academic book was not as insidious as the implication that the work would have been published if it had paid fealty to the very same Judith Butler that Will Self railed against. A cancelled book can be published elsewhere, but a compromised book remains in the corpus, and poisons the well of knowledge.

It is more than obvious from reading their contemporary output that institutions of higher education have become self-serving in ensuring their continued growth as businesses. If the quantity of available talent is naturally occurring and finite, rather than manufactured from a malleable human resource which can be scaled up with greater production capacity, there must be a limit beyond which the university is incapable of producing anything of value. And yet the only limit on the growth of the institution is the capital it can raise, on the basis of the number of students it can attract from around the world.

Certainly there are talented overseas students who have benefited from studying in Britain, but that source of revenue is short-term. Firstly, that PhD student who studied in London a few years ago is now a lecturer somewhere else, quite possibly overseas. Secondly, machine learning is already eating up undergraduate tuition fees. The recent ‘AI teaching’ scandal at the University of Staffordshire was the logical outcome of a permissive attitude to the use of large language models. As the university’s own guidelines state:

“You can use tools to support your creative and writing processes but the end product must have been produced by yourself and as a result of your own research and learning.”

Where, exactly, is the line supposed to be drawn between ‘supporting processes’ and the ‘end product’? At precisely the time when UK universities should have been emphasising the value of in-person, human-scale education if they had any foresight whatsoever, Staffordshire showed us the future of the sector.

Higher education has perhaps been the only growth industry in the West, other than tech hype. As I wrote regarding the work of Samuel Pisar, actual industrial production was long ago offshored to communist regimes which control wages and direct industrial relations from an authoritarian state apparatus. Even the tech industry itself, the darling of the Western stock markets, is an outgrowth of computer science courses in the universities, combined with the manufacturing power of communism.

We would not have trillions of dollars pouring into so-called artificial intelligence stocks if it were not for an army of programmers produced each year by universities from Cambridge to Cluj to Bangalore, backed by the ability of the Nvidia-Arm symbiosis to produce chips at scale in China.

The fact that ‘AI’ tools produce meaningless slop for the time being cannot be allowed to distract us from the fact that Western economies have been moribund since capitalism ended in 2008, with concurrent declines in inflation-adjusted incomes for their working classes. Perhaps the ‘cost of living crisis’ decried by Western progressives is a direct result of the globalisation which they ceased criticising after the labour movement’s last-gasp ‘Battle of Seattle’ in 1999, the end of class analysis, and the rise of identity politics to fill the gap.

It is so much easier to write a paper tearing down science than it is to make a genuine scientific breakthrough. And so we have students trained in sophistry attempting to argue that humans can change sex, or that science itself is problematic because of its ‘whiteness’, while typing out their thesis on a computer which they cannot begin to understand the workings of.

Perhaps after exceeding its capacity to add value to society, the business of Higher Education has become decadent. Its excesses are part of the Cultural Revolution phase which came lately to the West, after our governments first lost their faith in the ability of capital to self-regulate markets, and then in the ability of citizens to make rational decisions about their potential exposure to a respiratory virus. Chinese history teaches us that the Red Guard are the first against the wall when the fever subsides. As Maoism gives way to Dengism, unproductive pseudo-intellectual decadence of the bourgeoisie will no longer be tolerated.

The problem-reproducing nature of Theory will only persist in a tolerant society, but that is apparently not the direction of travel. For example, it seems you can only become an executive of the British Broadcasting Corporation with a certain perspective on the world, and a relentlessly positive view of transvestites for some reason, which you broadcast to a new generation. The value of this perspective is not necessarily accruing to society in general, but to the individual who uses political networks for personal advancement. They may think of themselves as being on the Left, but they are not good communists, yet.

Under the regime of a western Deng or a Xi, any perspective which is not of the Party will be eliminated. And so if for example the Party decides that transgenderism is not compatible with its plans for the national birth rate, that BBC executive will be out of favour. Have you noticed the lack of cross-dressing Chinese influencers, despite the hegemonic hold on youth culture of TikTok? Perhaps Western decadence is not in the five-year plan.

The news that Netflix is to borrow billions of dollars in order to acquire Warner Brothers suggests a potential solution for the Western university sector. This monopolistic consolidation is not unprecedented, if we cast our minds back to the purchase of Columbia Pictures by Sony in 1989. While the analogue hardware business of Sony was considered compromised by the relative failure of the Betamax system in the consumer market, its Betacam variant was dominant among professional video users. Sony made high-quality TV sets and broadcast cameras profitably, enabling it to pay for Columbia with $3.4 billion US dollars in cash, back in the day when $3.4 billion was considered a lot of money.

Elite universities, the BBC and the Guardian are sitting on billionaire endowments, in some cases dating back to the era of the transatlantic slave trade, so they are safe from reality for now. However, it is feasible that today’s tech companies could buy or build universities to deliver the kind of graduates they need, without the intersectional drama or the expense and inefficiencies of contemporary academic administrations.

A key difference is that the universities don’t own ‘intellectual property’ in the way that movie studios do, thanks to the concept of author copyright in the West. Traditional colleges are platforms and publishers, not owners of academic works. An alternative model is being developed by Jordan Peterson, who outgrew his university due to his YouTube presence and trade book sales, creating his own platform under his own brand and presumably ownership. I see no reason why in time the Peterson Academy can’t be as successful as the London School of Economics set up by Fabian conspirators against capitalism, or much more so.

I predict that academic journals will be the first to go, because their business model is preposterous. Discussing a research proposal with a sponsor, I was reminded that so-called ‘open access’ journals charge academics for the privilege of putting their work online for free, despite relying on the free labour of other academics to review and edit the work. If you’ve ever been in a rock ‘n roll band, you’ll be aware that ‘pay to play’ is a shake-down operated by sleazy music venue and festival owners who will accept bribes to put your band on a bill with better-known acts.

Given that the cost of publishing online is tending towards zero, and much of what is being published in supposedly ‘peer-reviewed’ journals is not worth the cost of digital paper, the academic publishing racket will be disrupted sooner rather than later. Whether the second and third-tier universities survive in their current form remains to be seen.

While researching my emerging theory of ‘consumer-communism’, which I began publishing about earlier this year, I found an intriguing side note in an article by Whitney Webb. More than fifty years ago, the idea of a transideological enterprise was being discussed in the United States, at the highest levels of the law and politics. This well-documented fact counters the received wisdom that multinational corporations are intrinsic to capitalism, hostile to communism, and exclusively a product of free markets.

It’s well known that Americans were not supposed to buy Cuban cigars because of a trade embargo with its origins in the Cold War. Fidel Castro’s regime was not the only communist state with which trade was forbidden for them. International lawyer and human rights advocate Samuel Pisar’s 1970 book ‘Coexistence and Commerce’ recorded that a total embargo on Chinese goods existed in the USA from 1950 to 1969. These bans were originally based on 1917’s Trading with the Enemy Act, originally signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson to frustrate German businesses.

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, an equivalent law for peacetime which covers any “unusual and extraordinary threat” to national security, foreign policy, or the economy declared by the President, giving him personal and direct authority over which countries can be traded with by the USA and its allies. Based on these precedents, Europeans who have been surprised by President Trump’s assertion of personal control over international trade need not be.

During the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, Chinese women were selling their hair to Westerners. The US embargo meant that importers could be prosecuted if they were caught buying hair of Chinese origin, but officials could not tell which hair was communist and which was capitalist. Their solution was to ban all Asian hair imports. Americans weren’t even allowed to buy a false moustache if there was a risk it might be made with Marxist hair.

The federal government of the United States went to extraordinary lengths to prevent American materials, machinery or export dollars ending up in Chinese hands. Foreign subsidiaries and agents which had any dealings with the United States were controlled from Washington DC by the threat of fines and sanctions, in a significant territorial over-reach. If your country had money from the Marshall Plan, you couldn’t trade with communists without Uncle Sam’s approval. That ban included what we now call ‘intellectual property’, right down to instruction manuals.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, every available mechanism was employed by the anti-communist lobby within the USA to frustrate trade with the East, including consumer boycott campaigns of products suspected to have been of socialist origin. When new hydroelectric turbines were needed for the Grand Coulee Dam, it was acknowledged that the best models were built in the Soviet Union, but their purchase was ruled out by President Johnson.

In one example Pisar cited which could have had deadly effects, Canada was prevented from exporting wheat to a hungry China. The machines used to unload the grain were made in the USA, which assumed control of the export on that basis. Even the ships and trucks used to transport goods to communist countries could be seized as punishment for trading with the enemy.

How did we get from total embargo to total dependence on China for consumer goods within the space of a few decades? It’s my view that Samuel Pisar was a pivotal figure in the last century, as the legal architect of the system we call globalisation. He’s now almost forgotten, except for his work late in life for UNESCO on Holocaust education by those who knew him.

Samuel was born in 1925 in Białystok, eastern Poland, to a middle-class Jewish family. This city was invaded several times between 1939 and 1944, by both the Soviets and the Third Reich. Samuel’s father was shot by the National Socialists for attempting to smuggle Jewish children out of the city’s ghetto. His mother put the teenage Samuel in long trousers, in the hope he would be selected for a labour camp as a young man rather than murdered as a useless child; a ruse which worked. Her fears were well-founded, as she and Samuel’s sister were deported to an extermination camp and executed immediately.

Pisar was moved through a series of four different concentration camps by the Nazi authorities in the East, including Auschwitz. On one occasion while detainees were being rounded up for execution, Samuel spotted a bucket of water, dropped to his knees and began scrubbing the floor, working towards the exit. Assuming that he was following orders to clean up, the camp guards passed him by, and Samuel survived another day.

This young orphan became obsessed with survival. While being marched out of his final concentration camp ahead of the American advance, and the shuffling column being under friendly fire from Allied planes, Pisar escaped into woodland, and eventually made contact with an American tank crew. Later, Samuel discovered that he was the only one of nine hundred pupils at his school to survive the war.

Broke and alone, the teenage Pisar made a living on the black market, selling discarded coffee thrown out by American GIs. A relative got him to England and then Australia, where Samuel studied law. As an exemplary student, doctorates at the Sorbonne and Harvard followed. Pisar was awarded an internship at the United Nations in 1955 after winning an essay competition, and in 1956 his American doctoral thesis was the basis of articles in the Harvard Law Review which attracted significant attention. At Harvard, Pisar met both fellow refugee Henry Kissinger and John F. Kennedy, and would later become the President’s trade adviser.

Lenin’s first economic plan for the Soviet Union had realised that the assistance of capitalist traders would be needed to deliver communism, due to the agrarian condition of the Eastern economies. However, Stalin took the view that the world’s economy should be split into two until the inevitable total victory of the proletariat, with the communist nations only trading among themselves.

In 1949, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or ‘Comecon’ was established, initially by the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. The Comecon faced difficulties in pricing the goods produced, but also resentment regarding national specialisation. Poorer members soon realised that if the East Germans and the Czechs could build on their pre-war industrial expertise to specialise in finished goods and technology, the agrarian nations would be in quasi-colonial servitude, supplying only food and raw materials.

Stalin’s approach had obvious limitations, compared to the pre-existing system of international trading. Why eat a dollar banana when a Romanian turnip makes a tasty snack, comrade? Pisar would later note that after the Man of Steel’s death, trade between communist nations declined, as commissars looked further afield for imports.

Just a few years after the peak of McCarthyism in the USA, Pisar’s argument was that if the West could create a sufficiently attractive global trading system, the Communist bloc would want to take advantage of it, thereby creating mutual dependence and making thermonuclear war contrary to the interests of all. And so Pisar’s survival instinct no longer just drove his personal ambition to escape the death camps, but extended to the world.

Pisar observed that the quickest way for the East to take advantage of Western technology was for a complete factory to be set up in a communist country. Notable examples were Fiat’s creation of the Moskvitch factory in Russia, and the Zastava factory in Yugoslavia. If we compare pictures of the Fiat models of the time, we can see that these are basically the same vehicles. The Zastava factory was bombed by the United States during the Kosovo War of 1999, frustrating those western communists who had bought a ‘Yugo’ in solidarity, but could no longer obtain spare parts for their cars.

How could a communist country with very limited hard currency which also wished to hold on to its gold reserves pay for new factories to be set up? Pisar explained in ‘Coexistence and Commerce’ that one way was to pay in finished goods. Using Milton Friedman’s example of the pencil created via free enterprise, the Chinese could pay for a factory built with foreign technology by shipping millions of pencils back to the West. However, that pencil can only sell at the price that we Westerners are willing to pay.

And so what looks like dumping of suspiciously cheap products can be a barter in which the Western importer turns those pencils back into hard cash. If you’ve wondered how it is possible to make a product, ship it half way around the world, and put it on our shop shelves for a dollar, it’s not just about scale of manufacturing bringing costs down.

‘Coexistence and Commerce’ was written for the American businessman whom in Pisar’s view, needed to be persuaded to trade with the East. It’s effectively a how-to manual for leveraging economic self-interest on both sides, with avoiding World War III as a bonus. The book relies on three main arguments: number one, communism is not going away, number two, there are business opportunities to be had if you are willing to deal with communist states, and number three, the Europeans are already doing it, so you should too if you want to remain competitive.

This book goes into great detail about the concerns Western businessman might have regarding trade with the East. Pisar’s good news was that patents would probably be respected. After some communist nations tried buying one example of a machine, stripping it to inspect the parts and making a fake version, the Eastern regimes quickly realised that this would effectively prevent any future sales of new technology to them, and ruin the possibility of reciprocal trade. Communist factories had also learned that investing in research and development to create products that the West already had for sale was a waste of precious time and money.

Individual copyright was another matter altogether. As Pisar noted in the chapter Authors’ Rights in a Communist Society, “Private interests in any publicly marketable creation, be it an original writing or a patentable invention, seem basically irreconcilable with the principle of socialist property. Since communist society conditions the individual to feel that he owes his education and training to the state, his intellectual output should, it might be argued, rightfully belong to the community as a whole… The extent to which acquired private rights may be enjoyed is, practically speaking, further circumscribed by the state’s control over the individual’s possibility to publish and, indeed, to express himself at all.”

Also stated pragmatically in Coexistence and Commerce was that the businessmen who moved their factories to communist states would enjoy paying lower wages and avoid the problem of strikes. And so it seems the tactics of the militant Left in the capitalist world helped bring about globalisation. As the 1970s wore on, with bitter industrial disputes and year-long strikes commonplace in the West, right-wing leaders such as Reagan and Thatcher talked of national renewal and curbing trade union power, but did not effectively resist globalisation despite their anti-communist rhetoric.

Perhaps by the time these leaders came to power in the West, the logic of Pisar’s argument seemed inescapable to business owners who had been locked in battle with their own workers. In that sense, the unions and left politicians who supported the anti-globalisation cause at the Battle of Seattle outside the World Trade Organisation’s conference in 1999 were reacting against a problem of their own making, thirty years or more in gestation.

Since that pivotal moment for the Left, when it abandoned its campaign to prevent working-class jobs being offshored, billions of dollars have flooded into ‘progressive’ causes from government coffers, and in some cases directly from the pockets of arch-capitalists, as Charlotte Gill has documented thoroughly.

Before anyone starts shouting about conspiracy theories or latent antisemitism, I have worked for organisations that have applied for and received significant funding from philanthropists of the George Soros variety, and can confirm that core missions are entirely malleable with sufficient cash dangled at the end of the string attached. Once a ‘non-profit’ grows above a certain size, with executives and a substantial payroll to satisfy, it can become as hungry for money as any corporation. And if money talks, a big funding deal shouts loudest. This is why I believe that the so-called progressive Left in the West has abandoned the cause of ordinary working people in favour of niche, divisive campaigns which do not challenge globalisation, and in some cases favour it.

A case in point is the on-going ‘open borders’ campaign on behalf of illegal migrants. Undocumented migration is far from beneficial to the average worker, as their wages are quite obviously being undercut by people not subject to minimum compensation, pensions and other workplace benefits that trade unions used to fight for on behalf of their members. A faux solidarity with migrants who do not compete for middle and upper-class jobs in the law, media or politics elides the advantages to the relatively wealthy of keeping service-sector wages down. The embarrassment of politicians caught hiring illegal migrants for domestic work, or investing in private rental housing which migrants with no access to mortgages depend on, is short-lived. As such, open borders policy, de facto or codified into law, is a continuation of the class war.

It is not the sons and daughters of the progressive classes who drown while making illegal border crossings, from which I conclude that working-class black, middle-Eastern and Asian people are expendables in the pursuit of globalisation. First, the factories went East; now those service sector and itinerant workers whose jobs cannot be offshored are moving West, at whatever cost to them and the home communities they abandon. And so I conclude that globalisation may declare itself anti-racist in theory, but is neo-racist in practice. It would be a great humanitarian act to end people trafficking and modern slavery, but our progressives are focused on tone policing and surveillance of critical opinion.

It was in a Wall Street Journal editorial of 1971 entitled “Toward a Multinational Economy” that Pisar coined the term ‘transideological enterprise’, meaning a business which is “without allegiance to any sovereign nation or political doctrine”. In its worst form, this corporation “roams the globe in disregard of national law, fiscal supervision or prevalent business standard”, he wrote. Before identity politics took it over, the western Left understood this.

Pisar, who died in 2015 aged 86, predicted in this 1971 article that “If political power is unable to lead, it will have to follow economic power in the creation of a supra-national system of rules and institutions without which the emergent world market cannot thrive.” It seems he was right.

Ultimately, Pisar did not put business profits before people. His friend and fellow human rights activist Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn published “The oak and the calf : sketches of literary life in the Soviet Union” in Russian in 1975, and in English in 1981. On page 358 of the English edition, Solzhenitsyn’s words were translated as:

Eastern tyranny found even stauncher supporters in Western businessmen: in other words, the most loyal supporters of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” were the capitalists. They tried to persuade the U.S. Congress that trade was the very thing to reinforce the rights of man in the U.S.S.R.! There was one man of rare insight among them, Samuel Pisar, an enthusiast for closer trade relations with the U.S.S.R. for many years, who published on 3 October an open letter to Sakharov: “The freedom of a single individual is more important than the whole of world trade put together.”

With the news that the Green Party of England and Wales now reports more members than the Conservative Party across the whole of the UK, a headline I didn’t ever expect to read, and the ruling Labour Party deeply unpopular, the political centre appears to be in trouble. I was invited on the Metapolitics podcast to talk about the Green Party of today, and the challenges it is likely to face on the path to significant power at the national level. Your comments and shares would be appreciated!

metapolitics

Green Party Special Episode

In this timely special episode, we examine the dramatic transformation underway in the Green Party of England and Wales through the eyes of Daniel Howard James, a member since the mid-1990s who offers an unvarnished insider’s perspective on a party experiencing profound ideological upheaval…

Listen now

10 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · metapolitics

In part one of this article, I explained the background to the asylum seeker accommodation issue in the UK, and the legal challenges made by local planning authorities aiming to shut down migrant hotels since 2022. In the recent High Court decision Epping Forest District Council v Somani Hotels Limited [2025] EWHC 2183 (KB), handed down on the 19th August 2025, the local council argued successfully that the use of the Bell Hotel to accommodate asylum seekers could represent a material change to ‘sui generis’ use, whether it is considered a hostel or not.

As we saw in part one, a hotel being converted to hostel use was previously considered a meaningful factor in the planning decision as to whether the use of a building had become anti-social or not. However, Epping hedged its bets on this point at the High Court, which was a reasonable course of action. Migrant hotels rented by Home Office contractors are not crowded like hostels for the homeless can be, with typically no more than two asylum seekers housed in each twin room, and no more sharing of facilities such as bathrooms than that. Therefore it was not certain that the High Court would decide that the Bell Hotel was in use as a hostel.

Although the UK government has used ‘bed and breakfast’ hotels for housing homeless families for decades, single men without a fixed abode are not generally given free hotel accommodation for months at a time. Both Labour and Conservative administrations have been accused of operating a two-tier system which favours illegal migrants making asylum claims ahead of legal residents and British people who happen to be homeless.

Claimant Epping Forest District Council’s win at the High Court implied the defendant Somani Hotels Ltd should have obtained planning permission for change of use before moving in the latest group of migrants who live at the Bell Hotel. As a consequence, the local authority obtained a temporary injunction under section 187B of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 to stop the migrants’ use of the building by the 12th September 2025, just a few weeks later.

The Bell Hotel on the outskirts of Epping was expanded to 80 bedrooms in the 1960’s, and has reportedly been in decline for some years. According to paragraph 83 of the Somani Hotels judgement, it has been used to house asylum seekers on and off since April 2005. In 2006 the owners obtained planning permission to demolish some of the buildings and convert the site into a care home for the elderly, but that plan was not followed through.

In March 2020, the Bell Hotel closed due to the Covid-19 lockdown and has not been used for tourism, business travellers or local events since. As early as May 2020 the hotel was opened for use by the homeless and asylum seekers during the pandemic, but closed again in March 2021. It reopened for use by asylum seekers from October 2022 to April 2024, and then closed for another year. So, the Bell Hotel’s track record as a viable business over the last five years has been sketchy, to say the least.

The local planning authority in Epping had been trying to take planning enforcement action against the Bell Hotel since at least July 2020. At that time, assurances were made by the hotel’s owner that accommodation for asylum seekers would end after the Covid-19 pandemic. A planning application for temporary change of use was made in February 2023, but after more than a year, the local authority had not made a decision on this case, and the application was then withdrawn by the applicant.

Normally, there is an eight-week statutory determination deadline for minor planning applications like that one. Complex cases can take far longer to resolve, and if so local planning authorities will typically negotiate extensions of time with an applicant. If the local authority has hinted that permission will not be granted, withdrawal avoids the negative publicity of a refusal of permission. However, this option also waives the right to appeal against that refusal, which may have been a tactical mistake on the hotel owner’s part.

In April 2025, the local authority resumed its planning enforcement action against the Bell Hotel’s owners, after government accommodation contractor CTM made arrangements with the Home Office to place asylum seekers there. The hotel owner stated that it would not make a fresh planning application for change of use, because, remarkably, the Home Office had advised that it should not even try to. Paragraph 12 of the Somani Hotels judgement states:

“...on 15th June 2025 the Defendant told the Claimant that it had decided not to proceed with an application for permission for change of use. This was said to be because of advice from the Home Office that it regarded the use as being a hotel and that it did not support the Defendant making an application for permission for change of use.”

Perhaps it was believed that after the failure of all but one of the 2022 migrant hotel injunction cases described in part one of this article, the decision in Great Yarmouth Borough Council v Al-Abdin & Ors [2022] EWHC 3476 (KB) had been the exception proving the rule that local planning authorities were powerless against the might of the Home Office and its accommodation contractors.

James Stubbs, local authority Planning Enforcement and Compliance Manager for the Council in Epping, was quoted in paragraph 17 of the Somani Hotels judgement as saying that there had been harm to the town “from the nature of the use and associated, sustained protests and disturbance, heightening the risk and fear of crime, and resulting in occupants of the Land being socially excluded from the community.”

However, lawlessness wasn’t all down to the locals. Paragraph 20 of the judgement sets out three examples of arrests of asylum seekers living at the Bell Hotel:

“i) On 5th April 2025 a resident was arrested for an alleged offence of arson said to have committed at the Bell.

ii) On 8th July 2025 a resident was arrested in respect of an incident alleged to have taken place in a restaurant approximately 0.7 miles from the Bell. The arrest was for an alleged sexual assault and related matters.

iii) On 12th August 2025 a resident was arrested for alleged offences of common assault, battery, and sexual assault.”

The fears of local people regarding these and potential future crimes committed by migrants were given limited weight in paragraph 82 of the judgement. Protests in the town were initially in reaction to the 8th July arrest. The Public Order Act 1986 was used to restrict public assembly in the vicinity of the Bell Hotel, and limit the duration of protests. The police had also used ‘dispersal orders’ to prevent protests near the hotel.

In paragraph 22 of the judgement, local councillor Holly Whitbread was quoted as saying “the protests are making residents feel unsafe and are damaging the local economy.” This was a slightly different argument regarding planning harm than Mr Stubbs from Epping’s planning department had made. He had implied that the harm to the town was intrinsic to the Bell Hotel’s use as migrant accommodation, as well as the protests that followed.

It was unclear if by ‘residents’, Councillor Whitbread was referring to the settled inhabitants of the town or the occupants of the Bell Hotel feeling unsafe. Nevertheless, it has previously been accepted by the courts that asylum seekers do not spend much money in the area of their hotel accommodation, and that has a negative economic effect on a town.

According to the evidence before the High Court, the council in Epping had recently supported the use of the Bell Hotel for asylum seeker accommodation, but it was unclear if whoever gave these assurances had informed the local planning department about this agreement. In paragraph 58 of the Somani Hotels judgement, it was stated that “before CTM had entered its contract with the Defendant there had been tri-partite discussions between CTM, the Home Office, and the Claimant in which those present had addressed how to handle the placement of asylum seekers at the Bell and in which the limit of 138 asylum seekers had been agreed.”

This assertion might have put the local planning enforcement team in the difficult position of having to challenge the earlier capitulation to national government’s demands regarding the use of the Bell Hotel. In the circumstances, an application to the High Court for a temporary injunction should have been a relatively quick way to resolve the matter, pending a full hearing of the injunction case some months later.

The judgement made in the Somani Hotels case was for the local authority to be granted ‘interim relief’. Despite media reporting that the Council and local protestors had ‘won’ the case, it was far from over. There was a risk that the Bell Hotel would have had to close for a short while, but there is no current prospect of the Home Office stopping the use of hotel accommodation in general for asylum seekers, unless it devises alternatives.

Epping’s interim relief lasted just ten days. On the 29th August 2025, the decision Secretary of State for the Home Department and Somani Hotels v Epping Forest District Council [CA-2025-002117] [CA-2025-002118] was issued by the Court of Appeal. At the time of writing the full decision has not been published, but a press summary was made available on the day. Just as it had for the original temporary injunction decision, mainstream media coverage lacked insight into the detail of the appeal case, despite this summary being available.

Paragraph 19 of this appeal summary noted that Home Office representatives had not attended the original Bell Hotel injunction hearing on 15th August 2025. Perhaps government lawyers assumed Epping’s claim would fail, like most of the similar cases heard in 2022. By the 18th August, the Home Secretary had applied to intervene in the case, after it had not gone her way. Despite the lateness of this application, the Court of Appeal allowed it.

The Somani Hotels case now featured national government and the hotel owner on one side, versus a small local authority and its planning department on the other. It was unusual that national government was intervening on the side of a company which had allegedly breached planning regulations the government had itself made, rather than backing the local planning officers who have to enforce those rules.

In paragraph 29 of this appeal summary, the original injunction judge in the High Court, Mr Justice Eyre, was chastised for failing to consider “the wider range of public interest factors” when not permitting late intervention from the Home Secretary in this planning enforcement case. The purpose of the High Court hearing a planning case is normally to make a decision according to planning law, rather than other matters.

In paragraph 37 of the summary, the Appeal Court returned to the concept of “the wider picture” as follows: “...the judge’s approach ignores the obvious consequence that closure of one site means that capacity needs to be identified elsewhere in the system, and may incentivise local planning authorities who wish to remove asylum accommodation from their area to apply to the court urgently before capacity elsewhere in the system becomes exhausted. The potential cumulative impact of such ad hoc applications was a material consideration within the balance of convenience, but was not considered by the judge, perhaps because he did not have the advantage in reaching his decision of evidence and submissions from the Home Office.”

The implication is that a local planning authority, and any court judge which sides with it, are not entitled to reach a decision regarding a local planning matter on an asylum hotel without first consulting the Home Office, which is not the government department responsible for planning matters (that’s the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government).

Rather than the Bell Hotel interim injunction case being settled on its own merits, the Appeal Court has decided that “the potential cumulative impact” of other, similar cases should be the deciding factor.

This appears to be a radical departure from Britain’s post-war planning principles. It implies that planning applications for contentious developments such as housing estates, new roads, airports, nuclear power stations or high-speed rail could be denied permission, even when compliant with planning law, just because if similar applications were made elsewhere, they might have unwanted ‘wider picture’ effects in combination. This case law could have the potential to introduce all kinds of matters which are not directly relevant to the application at hand into planning decisions.

Paragraph 39 of the summary of Secretary of State for the Home Department and Somani Hotels Limited v Epping Forest District Council makes the Court of Appeal’s reasoning clear: “If an outbreak of protests enhances the case for a planning injunction, this runs the risk of acting as an impetus or incentive for further protests, some of which may be disorderly, around asylum accommodation. At its worst, if even unlawful protests are to be treated as relevant, there is a risk of encouraging further lawlessness.” However, all contentious planning applications and land uses have the potential to attract protestors, not just those concerned with asylum hotels.

On this basis, an interim injunction against illegal felling of ancient trees could be denied because it might incentivise other protests against illegal felling, some of which might or might not be unlawful protests under the Acts of Parliament on the UK’s statute book which aim to control public order and dissent. In this scenario, the trees would be likely to be felled by the time the main injunction was heard.

Epping’s case for a permanent injunction at the Bell Hotel, preventing its use by asylum seekers, is expected to be heard at the High Court in mid-October 2025. Despite what you may have heard on the TV news, the Home Office’s battle with local communities over asylum seeker accommodation is anything but resolved, and the implications of this case could be profound.

Britain has a proud history of offering refuge to people fleeing war and persecution. The many examples include the Russian and Baltic Jews who fled the pogroms of the 19th century to settle in cities like London and Manchester, the ten thousand children of the Kindertransport who arrived from Germany and eastern Europe prior to Britain’s declaration of war against the Third Reich, and more than 200,000 Ukrainians in the years since Russia’s recent invasion. There have also been more than 160,000 arrivals under the British Nationals Overseas scheme since 2021, many of whom are Hong Kongers fleeing the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdowns.

Just as a hundred and fifty years ago, events in far away places still have a push effect on refugee migration to Britain. However, it is the use of hotels to accommodate migrants which has created a flash point for communities around Britain, including opposing groups, pro and anti migrant, facing off against each other in the streets. The ‘small boats’ route from France in particular has attracted the most attention, although it represents a minor percentage of inward migration overall.

It is not Ukrainian or Hong Kong refugees arriving on the south coast of England illegally, as Britain’s international obligations to those groups have resulted in the creation of special visa schemes. Residents of other countries such as Afghanistan or Iran still have the ability to claim asylum after arriving in Britain.

The demographic profile of small boat migrants also appears to be in stark contrast to recognised refugees. For example, only 21% of Ukrainian visa holders in Britain are men between the ages of 18 and 64, with 46% being women, children being 26% and the elderly making up the remaining 6%.

Since small boat crossings began to be detected in significant numbers in 2018, when the people traffickers’ business model evidently changed, the six countries of Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Albania, Syria, and Eritrea have provided 70% of the nationals arriving by small boat. The number of people detected crossing the Channel since then peaked in 2022 at 46,000 per year, although the number who evaded detection is of course unknown. There have been 20,000 illegal crossings detected in the first half of 2025.

This week, the High Court in London handed down its judgement in the case Epping Forest District Council v Somani Hotels Limited [2025] EWHC 2183 (KB), also known as the ‘Bell Hotel’ case, after the name of a specific property in Epping owned by the defendant. The UK government has insisted that it needs to provide this type of accommodation to asylum seekers because of the duties imposed on the Home Secretary by the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. Mainstream media coverage indicated that the Somani Hotels case had ‘something to do with planning’, but provided little detail.

The post-World War II urban planning system in England attempted to ensure that unsuitable land uses would not exist side-by-side; for example, a glue factory should not be built next to a primary school. Rather than use zoning, as in the United States, each typical land use is given a class in secondary legislation known as the Use Classes Order, and if a particular building’s use doesn’t fit, it is considered sui generis (in a class of its own).

Hotels are in the C1 use class, along with guest houses and boarding houses. Hostels, however, were moved out of the C1 class some years ago because they tended to cause public nuisance, and so depending on how a building is used, it can become sui generis even if it was built for the C1 class.

In fact, Somani Hotels was just the latest in a series of attempts by local government since 2022 to use court injunctions in order to frustrate the will of national government and its contractors settling refugees in hotels at taxpayers’ expense. Contrast this to the Kindertransport or the Homes for Ukraine scheme which saw mostly women and children accommodated in private homes by British volunteers, with relatively small payments made by the state to cover their expenses.

From this need for hotel accommodation, I infer that most small boat migrants do not have sufficient family connections in Britain to be accommodated, and that the British public, including the substantial Muslim community, does not have sufficient goodwill for these mostly young men to offer them space in their homes.

Previous generations of refugees, evacuated women and children from the cities, and even prisoners of war were offered farm accommodation in return for their labour, but the agricultural context has changed with mechanisation since then, such that there is no longer an unfulfilled demand for unskilled farm workers. And so the contemporary migrant hotels, block-booked by government contractors, tend to be on the urban fringe, or in Victorian seaside resorts which have lost business to cheaper or more salubrious competition overseas.

The decision Ipswich Borough Council v Fairview Hotels (Ipswich) Ltd & [2022] EWHC 2868 (KB) concerned various hotel operators and accommodation service providers across two locations: the Novotel Ipswich Centre Hotel in Suffolk, and the Humber View Hotel in Yorkshire. In both locations, the relevant local planning authority had alleged that the use of these C1 use class buildings by asylum seekers was a breach of planning control, specifically a material change of use to a hostel without planning permission.

Injunctions were sought by the local authorities under section 187B of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. In paragraph 24 of the above decision, Holgate J wrote: “Because many asylum seekers are vulnerable, the accommodation must be exclusive and not shared with other people.” This confirms that the hotels in question were not available to the general public or tourists while the hotels were under contract to government suppliers of asylum seeker accommodation, such as Serco Ltd and other companies.

Paragraph 40 of the Fairview Hotels decision notes that Serco Limited had a 12 month contract with the Home Office regarding this accommodation, and 70 asylum seekers had moved into the Novotel in Ipswich by the 25th October 2022. Paragraph 59 notes that the Humber View Hotel was block booked initially for use by asylum seekers for three months, with an option to extend. Paragraph 71 further notes that the Use Classes Order (UCO):

“does not operate so as to treat a change from a use within a Use Class to another use outside that Class as a material change of use (Rann v Secretary of State for the Environment (1979) 40 P&RC 113). So where the use of land changes from a hotel to a hostel, the only effect of the UCO is that that change is not excluded from development control. The UCO cannot be used to treat that change as representing in itself a material change in the use of the land. Whether that is so will depend on a case-specific assessment of the effect of the change on the character of the use of the land, in other words, the planning consequences of the change.”

Paragraphs 74 and 75 of this decision state:

“The word “hostel” is not a term of art in relation to duration of stay. It can include not only youth hostels for transient occupation but also long-term accommodation as in the case of a nurse’s hostel. The sleeping accommodation is often, but by no means always, in the form of dormitories rather than single rooms and provides shared working, eating and recreational facilities. It is of the essence of a hostel that it provides relatively basic, inexpensive accommodation.”

“Plainly there is a spectrum of hostel uses. Glidewell J said that a nurses’ hostel in which the occupants live, rather than stay, shares many of the characteristics of permanent housing. On the other hand, a hostel used as transient accommodation has many of the characteristics of a hotel: people coming and going, people booking in and checking out, people who stay in the hostel but live elsewhere.”

Paragraph 79 of the Fairview Hotels decision notes that in the hotel case R (Westminster CC) v SSCLG [2015] J.P.L. 1276:

“a number of rooms were in use as dormitories (with bunk beds for 4, 6 or 8 people) with shared bathroom facilities… the premises had to be supervised to address noise and disturbance caused to neighbours by the occupants.”

Paragraph 110 of the Fairview Hotels decision notes:

“Even if a hostel use would be involved, the key question still remains whether it would represent a material change of use. That would depend upon the planning consequences of the change. In each case that turns upon the planning harm identified by the claimant.”

Paragraph 112 notes:

“The claimants accept that in each case the proposed use would not cause any environmental damage, or any harm to the amenity of neighbouring uses, or any harm to the character and appearance of the area. The buildings would not be altered. There would be no issues relating to traffic generation.”

Paragraph 118 notes:

“…evidence has been given by Serco, LGH and Mears of having made sole use arrangements with a significant number of hotels to accommodate asylum seekers without action being taken for an alleged breach of planning control, at least not until proceedings started to be brought recently. For example, LGH operates or has operated sole use arrangements at 18 hotels. Serco provides temporary initial accommodation in 84 hotels. Meers provides for 5,000 asylum seekers in 80 hotels.”

In the conclusion of the Fairview Hotels decision, the court refused the local authority applications to continue injunctions against alleged material changes of use.

The decision Great Yarmouth Borough Council v Al-Abdin & Ors [2022] EWHC 3476 (KB) followed the Fairview Hotels decision, Fenland District Council v CBPRP Ltd & Ors [2022] EWHC 3132 (KB) and other similar cases in North Northamptonshire and Stoke-on-Trent.

In Al-Abdin the local planning authority had sought an injunction under section 187B of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 preventing use of the Villa Rose Hotel, or any other within the area designated by Policy GY6 of the 2021 local plan for Great Yarmouth, as a hostel.

An enforcement notice preventing hostel use of the Villa Rose Hotel had previously been issued by the local planning authority in 2006, and was still in force. That hotel had not been used for the accommodation of asylum seekers at the point in time a section 187B injunction was sought by the local authority, but an offer had been made to Home Office contractor Serco Ltd to commence asylum seeker use of this accommodation.

In paragraph 16 of the Al-Abdin decision, Jonathan Kingham of the Home Office was quoted as having stated that “By the end of November 2022 there were about 105,900 people being accommodated of whom 47,100 were in short-term accommodation.”

Therefore at that time, the majority of asylum seekers known to be provided with accommodation by the Home Office contractors were classified as being in long-term accommodation, but a significant number were in short-term ‘initial accommodation’ (referred to as IA), including the use of hotels.

Policy GY6 of the relevant local plan, Great Yarmouth Seafront Area, designates properties facing the sea and on side streets immediately behind this frontage, including the Villa Rose Hotel, for protection from certain changes of use. The last paragraph of this policy is negatively-worded, stating:

“Residential accommodation which is not self-contained, and other forms such as houses of multiple occupation, hostels and similar uses, will not be permitted within the Seafront Area.”

Paragraph 39 of the Al-Abdin decision reports that at the time of this case, “the average duration of stay for an asylum seeker in IA has increased from around 21 days to 158 days…” This average figure implies a proportion of these asylum seekers are staying in properties used for ‘initial accommodation’ by Home Office contractors, including C1 use class hotels, for more than five months. In paragraph 55 of the Al-Abdin decision, Holgate J wrote:

“There would be little or no expenditure by asylum seekers in the town. They would not contribute to the local economy. In my judgment this is a highly relevant factor in the present policy context. Policy GY6 resists hostel use for what have been judged to be sound planning and economic reasons. This is a policy which is highly specific. It does not, for example, cover the whole of the borough or the whole of the town. Instead, it is targeted at the most important part of the town for tourism. It applies to a carefully defined strip of land closely related to the major tourist attractions.”

The Al-Abdin decision continued in paragraph 56:

“…in my judgment the particular policy considerations raised in this case by Policy GY6 strengthen the Council’s case on breach of planning control significantly.”

Paragraph 70 of the decision noted:

“…it is plain on the evidence from the Home Office and Serco that no consideration was given to planning policies to see whether the site being considered lies within an area subject to a strong, clear development control so as to give rise to a potentially substantial breach of planning control. The Council has made clear its strong planning objections to the intention to use the Villa Rose to accommodate asylum seekers as soon as it was made aware of it.”

In conclusion, paragraph 79 of the Al-Abdin decision stated:

“In the special circumstances of this case, in my judgment the factors in favour of continuing the injunction plainly outweigh those in favour of discharging it. The immediate restraint of a hostel use would be commensurate with the planning harm relied upon by the Council in this case.”

A final injunction order was granted during May 2023 regarding the Villa Rose Hotel and any other relevant property within the designated area for Great Yarmouth local plan policy GY6. And so Great Yarmouth Borough Council was successful in frustrating the Home Office, while other local authorities had not been.

Part two will follow, bringing us up to date with the judgement in Epping. If you find this type of article interesting or useful, please comment below.

Cornwall, the most south-western county of England, is reportedly one of the poorest regions in northern Europe, after west Wales. Before Brexit, Cornwall was said to have enjoyed the largest proportion of EU subsidies of any English county, but nonetheless 56.5% of its residents voted ‘Leave’ in the 2016 referendum. The ‘workhouse’ system of indentured servitude for poor whites had persisted until the creation of the National Health Service in 1948, when the last surviving inmates were moved to hospitals for the infirm. I once visited the site of the former Madron workhouse, which had been converted to a slaughterhouse once it was no longer used for housing Cornish forced labourers.

While the county’s statistics are middling by English standards, average data obscures a huge discrepancy between wealthy and poor residents, and the neighbourhoods they live in. The local tin mining and fishing industries which took many workers’ lives have not recovered from intense international competition. Improved road infrastructure has made the county more accessible to wealthy weekenders from the rest of England, who have bought up cottages and farmhouses in the more attractive coastal settlements and rural districts. ‘Poldark’, the 2015 reboot of a 1970’s TV series about the tribulations of Cornish mine owners, has helped sell the county’s rugged landscapes to a new generation of second-homers.

Passing through the Cornish cathedral city of Truro, the county’s administrative centre, I needed a haircut. Owing to the unprecedented number of barbers now fighting for trade in the UK’s service economy, most of which only seem to have one or two people working in them, I quickly located a shop with an empty chair and a barber standing idle. This barbershop was not explicitly Turkish, but offered the standard haircuts of any similar men’s hair business set up around the UK in the last few decades.

The other chair in the barbershop was occupied by a white Cornishman with a full beard, and while at work on his haircut, his barber made a quip about his conversion to Islam. I wasn’t sure if this was one of those half-joking, half-serious conversation openers, but the local man in the chair responded by saying that his sister had already converted to the religion. She had met a man from Pakistan online while gaming on Sony’s PlayStation network, who then moved to a Mediterranean island, where the couple had married and were living now.

What struck me about this overheard barbershop conversation was the contrast between Islam’s offer to young people and what mainstream British education provides them with. Conversion to Islam, in some contemporary cases from a secular ‘Christian lite’ identity of nothing-in-particular, presents clear and strict rules and roles for both men and women. It obviously prohibits recreational drug and alcohol use, promoting strong familial bonds and harsh, popular justice, as part of a growing international movement claimed to be the fastest-growing religion in the UK.

I later found out that the Truro area has a mosque in addition to a cathedral. In fact, Cornwall’s only mosque is a ten-minute drive south-west of the city, located in a former Methodist chapel. The next nearest mosque is in Plymouth, Devon, over fifty miles from Truro by road, over the county’s border. It would therefore be a great exaggeration to say that Muslims are taking over this corner of England, despite our German royal family’s enthusiam for the religion.

The former Duke of Cornwall, King Charles III, made his feelings clear regarding his title of ‘defender of the faith’, held by the English monarch since the reign of Henry VIII. His great-great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria, on both sides of his family due to Royal inbreeding, made herself Empress of India and learned Hindustani from her Muslim servant Abdul Karim. Charles’ ex-wife Diana was of course in a relationship with Emad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Muna'im Al-Fayed, known as ‘Dodi’, at the time of their deaths.

As the Middle East shows us, it is perfectly possible to have an Islamic state which remains a monarchy, and a wealthy one at that. Christianity is not indigenous to the British Isles, and so Islam could one day be its replacement, particularly if the latter religion is better at producing offspring than the former.

While some young men convert to Islam in prison, allegedly due to peer pressure from other prisoners, that is not likely to be the whole story of Muslims in the UK who are not migrants or descended from migrants, due to the relatively small number of British people who spend significant time locked up.

Let’s compare Islam to what is on offer from the UK’s university system, or the woke factions within our government-embedded Church of England: the dissolution of traditional categories, a hostility to authentic masculinity and the heterosexual family, and tolerance of intoxication to the point where ‘safe supply’ means free drugs for addicts.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that alcohol brands from Bud Light to Smirnoff are heavily invested in transgender propaganda, because as Radclyffe Hall noted in her depiction of the Parisian demi-monde, unhappy hedonists tend to drink a lot of booze. Here’s an example from Smirnoff’s current ‘Show Up Show Off!’ marketing campaign for alcoholic diversity:

“The party is always better when everyone’s invited. Because when everyone is welcome, anything feels possible and life is infinitely more fun!

Smirnoff believes intersectionality is a superpower, not a setback, and we’ve always celebrated the full spectrum of expression in the LGBTQUIA+ community.

Smirnoff has a proud history of celebrating expression with the LGBTQUIA+ community for over 50 years, and our support is only growing stronger.

Our ever-expanding array of flavors and products mirrors the ever-expanding expression of the LGBTQUIA+ community. From our classic No. 21 vodka to Pink Lemonade, Peach Lemonade, and Spicy Tamarind, we're serving flavor.”

Here’s a photo of the ‘Rainbow Network’ allies at booze corporation Diageo, which owns Smirnoff and many other alcohol brands, at the launch of its Pride Month initiative for 2022. Judging by the creases, it looks like they just unpacked the Progress Pride flag they bought on Temu.

And here’s what the company’s press release said, in its own words:

“Pride is a key part of our Spirit of Progress commitments to Champion Inclusion & Diversity. Celebrating Pride is not just the right thing to do, it’s a way to ensure our employees feel they can bring their whole selves to the workplace, every day. However, we need society to go further. There is still a long way to go for this community to be accepted in parts of the world. Our work here will not be done until acceptance is everywhere.

Throughout the next month, our Rainbow Network resource group will host a number of activities around the world:

• Our global flag raising event, where over 80 sites will raise their Progress Pride flags.

• The North America Rainbow Network in partnership with the Smirnoff Brand Team will be joined by Alyssa Edwards, star of Ru Paul’s Drag Race for a fabulous virtual Drag Bingo.

• To mark the partnership with Queer Britain and opening of the new LGBTQIA+ Museum in London, a launch event will take place on 9th June at Diageo 1HQ with opening comments from Cristina Diezhandino, Rainbow Network’s Global Ally. The CÎROC team will host an Iconic Ball to honour 50 years of LGBTQIA+ UK history — past, present, and future.

• Our Supply Chain & Procurement Rainbow Network will host a series of educational events including a Learning 4 Life event based at Johnnie Walker Princes Street aimed at upskilling hospitality teams across LGBTQIA+ venues, a virtual webinar with the We Are All Able Employee Resource Group to highlight intersectionality of people living with a disability and a relaunch of the Rainbow Network Book club.

• In Brazil, continuing from last year’s success, The Bar will collaborate with Casa 1, a local charity to support LGBTQIA+ homelessness, donating a sizable % of sales to help improve the livelihood of individuals, particularly those within the Trans community.”

So, any notion that ‘Pride’ remains a grass-roots movement for lesbian, gay or bisexual liberation is clearly false. Diageo is just one of the many corporations funding and driving the creation of a right to get wasted, which quite obviously leads to disinhibition and the inability for individuals to set sexual boundaries. Flavoured alcohol is not only the ‘Spirit of Progress’, in a barely-concealed pun; it is quite literally the queer solvent for the postmodern attack on genuine bodily autonomy.

To the list of secular ‘rights’, we can now add assisted suicide on demand, which is explicitly forbidden in Islam. It is hard to envisage a more nihilistic culture than the one the progressive West now offers: live queerly, die young. In the past, we might have expected a clear choice for adolescents between traditional morality and rebellion, but if they enter an English cathedral to find the same flag shown in the Smirnoff advertisements, what are they supposed to think?

Inspecting Gender

Is Gender a New Religion? Or a Very Old One?

In 1945, when a humble Egyptian peasant was digging the soil in Nag Hammadi, just around the bend in the Nile from Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, he chanced upon an ancient pot. Like better-known Egyptologists, he smashed this historic find open, in the hope of finding treasure, but was disappointed to find the pot only contained some old writings. …

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a year ago · 61 likes · 7 comments · Daniel Howard James

In this cultural vacuum, Islam offers the certainty that the contemporary secular mindset lacks. An impressionable student radicalised by the war in Gaza following the October 7th pogrom of young Jews, at a music festival of a type they might have attended they/themselves, is already primed to accept Islam as a viable way of life. The existence of ‘Queers for Palestine’ implies the masochistic desire to be punished for debauchery by submission to a higher authority, which is entirely compatible with the BDSM foundation of academic queer theory. And a diversity, inclusion and equity officer has the right skillset for joining the mutawa.

Unfortunately for liberals, their desire to ‘be kind’ and get along with everyone has no defence against dominating ideologies. Unless they can articulate a robust identity which involves an attractive combination of personal well-being, the value of extended family, filial piety, and the punishment of wrong-doing, one which combats self-destructive extremist nihilism head-on, their beliefs will wither away. The Enlightenment will be a historical anomaly, looked back on as a wrong turn and a mistake for Western society.

Jaywick, a neighbourhood of five thousand people living fifty miles east-north-east of London on the Essex coast, is consistently rated as Britain’s most deprived community, with worse social metrics than any northern post-industrial city. Its single-storey timber homes were not built as a housing project, but as holiday chalets which became occupied by exiled Cockneys ‘on their uppers’ as permanent residences.

These shacks were the cheapest accommodation available after the Blitz destroyed so many working-class London homes. Following a century of minimal development, the worst of these chalets resemble some of Detroit’s abandoned homes; only in Jaywick, people still live in them.

Despite being within day trip distance from the English capital, the area has few amenities, except a pub called the ‘Never Say Die’. The beach at Jaywick is hidden behind a concrete flood wall because the village’s housing is practically at sea level. A Channel 5 documentary series ‘Benefits by the Sea’, which aired in the UK over two seasons in 2015 and 2016, cemented the area’s reputation as a place to avoid, given the many alternative beach destinations available to holidaymakers.

In a prominent site on the seafront, the new ‘Sunspot’ building is a £4.8 million regeneration project, comprising small business units and what is supposedly a market hall. Its design is low-effort in the extreme, resembling a factory left at the beach by accident. Naturally, this building won a ‘highly commended’ architectural award from the RIBA Journal in 2024.

The local council has invested further millions in rebuilding the roads around Jaywick, but there has been no gentrification apparent as a result. Instead of hipsters pedalling up and down the beach road on expensive bicycles, the vehicle of choice in Jaywick is a disability scooter with a 24-pack of super-strong lager on the footplate, used by residents of all ages.

Last month, the Essex Cultural Diversity Project re-ran its ‘Bhaji on the Beach’ event, previously held in August 2021. This day out at the seaside for south Asian families, who were brought into Jaywick in coaches from nearby towns, was named after a 1993 movie in which a group of women of Indian heritage make a voyage of discovery to Blackpool in the north of England.

Blackpool is the second most-deprived neighbourhood in Britain, after Jaywick, but as a much larger town it does have more going on. Its northern lights once illuminated a low-rent Las Vegas by the sea, but with bingo instead of blackjack, and donkey rides.

After a picnic on Jaywick’s nondescript beach, a Bollywood dance class took place in the small ‘market hall’ at the Sunspot. Most of the local businesses were closed, as the event was held on a Sunday. As I stood watching the dancers, music from the stage blended with the low frequencies of subwoofers pumping drum n’ bass from a Jaywick chalet. Urban desi children enjoyed ice cream and perhaps the rare feeling of sand between their toes, while the unmistakable stench of skunk smoke wafted from the locals’ homes across the Sunspot’s yard.

One apparently local man told an event organiser that more people from Jaywick would have attended ‘Bhaji on the Beach’ if they had known about it, but it seems they hadn’t been invited. In the contemporary context, diversity no longer means different peoples within a community learning to get along; it means a diversity of communities, which don’t need to have anything in common.

This day out at the seaside was part of the ‘Beach of Dreams’ arts festival, avowedly “exploring the unique heritage, cultures, and futures of our coastlines in the face of the climate emergency.” The relevance of an event which transported people to a coastal community for the day, precisely because they did not live there, was unclear. As much as I enjoy a dance class, I didn’t readily understand the connection between Bollywood routines and rising sea levels on the Essex coast, or the cultural memory of the 1953 flood which killed 300 people in East Anglia and caused the evacuation of 32,000 more.

The Indian diaspora might be the very last community in England to accept a ban on long-haul flights in order to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. Decades ago, tens of thousands of Indians found work at Heathrow, many of them settling in Southall, and some made their fortunes in the aviation market.

Billionaire Surinder Arora, born in the Punjab, now owns a number of hotels around the UK’s main airports. A ‘Back Heathrow’ lobby group supported by many local South Asians makes the case for this international hub’s continuing expansion, including the third runway approved by Labour Party chancellor Rachel Reeves in January 2025.

Is Greta Thunberg, who only travels by private yacht except when she’s being deported, really going to stop the Asian community moving around the world as it pleases? We can believe in open borders, or we can believe in ‘net zero’, but to argue for both at the same time should cause cognitive dissonance for the contemporary environmental movement.

The Beach of Dreams festival is organised by Kinetika, a ‘National Portfolio’ organisation of Arts Council England, which “unites communities through exceptional silk-based designs and immersive public spectacles that inspire social action and transform local environments.” It aims to “celebrate cultural diversity, and cultivate resilient, sustainable communities worldwide.”

There are just under a thousand organisations in England’s National Portfolio, which reportedly have £446 million a year ‘invested’ in them by the Arts Council. The disingenuous use of the language of capital markets, ‘portfolio’ and ‘investment’, obscures the plain truth that the Arts Council essentially gives public money to favoured middle-class projects, as a welfare scheme for the sons, daughters and non-binary offspring of the political establishment.

The UK’s Labour government has recently reviewed how it can protect arts funding from “short-term political expediency”; in other words, the risk that a democratically-elected Parliament might not want to splurge this money in future. Funding for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which funds the Arts Council in turn, is set to reach £2 billion a year by 2028.

I don’t begrudge anyone on a low income a subsidised trip to the seaside, but the lasting impression of my day out at Jaywick was of the ineptitude of an arts establishment which has become so dependent on box-ticking that it can’t recognise its own incoherence. Diversity? Check. Climate change? Check. Money in the bank? Check.

The concept of ‘forced teaming’ is attributed to Gavin de Becker’s 1997 self-help book ‘The Gift of Fear’. It refers to the manipulative tactic of declaring a problem as common between people, demanding our urgent attention, in order to overcome lack of trust of the manipulator.

Are the people of Jaywick’s concerns about climate change, if any, similar to Britain’s south Asian community? Will Asian businessmen decarbonise their investment portfolios and fund-raise to save the poor Cockneys from having their homes washed away by floods? And will the Arts Council fix rising sea levels in Bangladesh, somehow? Or should our premier cultural subsidy gatekeeper avoid forced teaming, and just fund the arts?

With enough will, the billions spent on art and culture projects annually might even do something about the ‘island of strangers’ that our Prime Minister warned us about. If sea levels continue to rise, there may no longer be a Jaywick, but there will be a lot more, and smaller, British Isles on higher ground.

I really appreciate your comments on, shares of and restacks of my articles, because as an independent researcher without a social media presence it seems very difficult to reach new readers for long-form writing in a media landscape saturated with soundbites and hot takes. Particularly if you're not just repeating well-known themes to please people and confirm their beliefs.

So, here's the list, most recent publication first:

The Autotheophiles and the (Gendered) Protestant Soul. Gender as religion, part nine - 9th August, 2026 https://genspect.substack.com/p/the-autotheophiles-and-the-gendered

A Gnostic Prophet for Our Age. Film review of Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) - 27th June 2026 https://genspect.substack.com/p/a-gnostic-prophet-for-our-age

Should Gender Identity be Sacred? Gender as religion, part eight - 3rd April 2026 https://genspect.substack.com/p/should-gender-identity-be-sacred

Colonialism, the Sex Trade and Polygender Societies. Gender as religion, part seven - 19th February 2026 https://genspect.substack.com/p/colonialism-the-sex-trade-and-polygender

Is Genderism an Esoteric Male Power Network? Gender as religion, part six - 24th December 2025 https://genspect.substack.com/p/is-genderism-an-esoteric-male-power

The Deification of the Transgender Child. Gender as religion, part five - 27th November 2025 https://genspect.substack.com/p/the-deification-of-the-transgender

The British Invasion and the Sex n’ Gender Outlaws. Gender as religion, part four - 13th June 2025 https://genspect.substack.com/p/the-british-invasion-and-the-sex

Sex and Death Cults, Old and New. Gender as religion, part three - 31st May 2025 https://genspect.substack.com/p/sex-and-death-cults-old-and-new

Jung, the Red Book and the Gnostic Gospels. Gender as religion, part two - 24th May 2025 https://genspect.substack.com/p/jung-the-red-book-and-the-gnostic

Is Gender a New Religion? Or a Very Old One? Gender as religion, part one - 17th May 2025 https://genspect.substack.com/p/is-gender-a-new-religion-or-a-very

Puberty blockers: creating a blank canvas for the surgeon-artist. What if the gender industry stops puberty not to help children, but in pursuit of aesthetic perfection? - 27th March 2025 https://genspect.substack.com/p/puberty-blockers-creating-a-blank

Why Do Transgender People Hate Their Bodies? Gender dysphoria is a symptom masquerading as a diagnosis - 3rd February 2025 https://genspect.substack.com/p/why-do-transgender-people-hate-their

An Ethical Design for the UK’s Puberty Blocker Trial? How should new research into gender interventions on children take place?- 22nd January 2025 https://genspect.substack.com/p/an-ethical-design-for-the-uks-puberty

Planned Parenthood, Junk Science and ‘Gender Affirming Care’: Why is an organisation set up for eugenics involved in gender medicine? 7th November 2024 https://genspect.substack.com/p/planned-parenthood-junk-science-and

Are Rogue Surgeons Psychopaths? Surgeons need our trust, but they cannot be expected to regulate themselves - 23rd October 2024 https://genspect.substack.com/p/are-rogue-surgeons-psychopaths

‘Gender Affirming Care’ is a Social Engineering Attack: What cybersecurity can tell us about institutional capture - 20th September 2024 https://genspect.org/gender-affirming-care-is-a-social-engineering-attack/

'The Well of Loneliness' and the Gendered Soul: One of those books which is often referenced, but rarely read - 4th September 2024 https://danielhowardjames.substack.com/p/the-well-of-loneliness-and-the-gendered

A Trip Down Meme-ory Lane: Trans Tropes are Older Than You Think They Are. What is it about culture that leads people to seek an alternative gender identity? - 27th August 2024 https://genspect.substack.com/p/a-trip-down-meme-ory-lane-trans-tropes

A Double Standard in the UK's Genital Surgery Laws? - 25th May 2024 https://genspect.substack.com/p/a-double-standard-in-the-uks-genital

Are “Life Goals” Anything to Do with Health Services? - 20th April 2024 https://genspect.org/are-life-goals-anything-to-do-with-health-services/

The New Puberty Blocker Experiment on the UK’s Children - 19th March 2024 https://genspect.org/the-new-puberty-blocker-experiment-on-the-uks-children/

And here's an interview with Jenny Poyer Ackerman on the subject of gender identity and my writing about it:

TransMuted Episode 15: sex, drugs, rock 'n cybersecurity - 27th September 2024 https://jennypoyerackerman.substack.com/p/listen-to-episode-15-sex-drugs-rock

I hope these articles are of interest. If there's an angle on gender I haven't covered, please let me know in a comment or a direct message here on Substack. I'm also interested in guest appearances and interviews if you have any questions about these writings, or the subject in general.

I am not an American, but perhaps like most people growing up with English as a native language, I have been steeped in American culture for as long as I can remember. I remain interested in the American project because it continues to impinge itself on a daily basis. I suspect the constant coverage of the United States in British media, which started long before Americans had access to these channels online, is at least in part because our journalists, novelists and pundits dream of making it ‘big’ there.

Walter Johnson, a Harvard professor, wrote The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States in time for it to be published during the fateful springtime of 2020, a month before George Floyd died. The author traces the history of St. Louis, Missouri, arguing for its special significance in American colonialism and racism. From the policy of ‘Indian removal’ during the settler period of the 18th and early 19th century, through the Civil War to the First World War and Depression, Johnson posits that this mid-Western city played a central role in making the United States what it is today. Particularly, in relation to white supremacy and racial animosity.

This narrow geographical approach offers a view into the USA and its history that I don’t often experience, based as it is on a single city (or two cities, counting East St Louis as a settlement in its own right). This book spans the full time that that the United States has been in existence, with a focus on what used to be called ‘race relations’.

The familiar tics of the white ‘progressive’ author writing about racism are visible in the text, such as capitalising Black but not white. However, it is in discussions of ‘whiteness’, the term supposedly derived from the work of black author W.E.B. Du Bois (a word which it is not clear to me that Du Bois used himself) that Johnson really gets unstuck. For example, the idea that German immigrants to St. Louis achieved ‘whiteness’ by supporting certain racist policies of the city administration suggests the author believes in the phenomenon as a property independent of skin colour, given that practically all German migrants to that city in the 19th century would have been white.

The implication of this distinction between white and whiteness is that black people have whiteness if they think other than how Theory predicts and demands they should, and more importantly, that white progressives can disown and diminish their whiteness, absolving themselves of racial guilt, if they try really hard to maintain correct, anti-whiteness thoughts and deeds.

I suspect that animosity which existed between rival groups of white migrants to St. Louis and the USA more generally, whether they were German, Irish, Polish or Italian in origin, really had nothing to do with ‘becoming’ white or achieving whiteness. Without having been there in the 18th or 19th century to verify my belief, I am confident that the native Americans and former slaves who lived in St. Louis during the settler period did not perceive the European immigrants as anything other than white. Perhaps this was because they did not have Theory to explain to them that whiteness is an acquired syndrome, having to do with the ownership of private property or some other economic factor. The binary thinking which assumes native and black Americans either didn’t own or didn’t make the effort to defend property is the progressive, patronising racism of assumptions and low expectations.

Neither do black or native people in St. Louis have agency, according to the neo-Marxist mindset evidenced in Johnson’s book. The author attacks Abraham Lincoln for taking the position that a victim of lynching should have received a fair trial, rather than Lincoln questioning why the victim should have been on trial at all. In fact, the man lynched had cut the throat of another man and stabbed someone else, which is why he was subjected to vicarious retribution. Theory requires all black people to be helpless victims of the white supremacist system, denying them the opportunity to act with intent, whether good or bad.

The portraits within this book of European revolutionary exiles playing a part in the American Civil War were interesting, but the implication that St. Louis was a hotbed of revolutionary activity falls flat. If the city really did have a strong tradition of working class solidarity and black community campaigns, why is the city as awful for black people as the author claims? If these revolutionaries genuinely cared about the lives of black people in the city, it would seem that either there were very few of them, that they enjoyed little popular support, or that their methods were ineffective. Possibly all three could be true. The implication is that white supremacy is all-pervasive and extraordinarily persistent across the centuries.

The message to any black people reading this book seems to be: join the (white-led) revolution, or forever be down-trodden. Like the (white) Frankfurt School Marxists who assumed that black people in the United States and elsewhere could form a ready-made revolutionary vanguard, the author’s intent appears to have been to construct a continuous narrative of injustice across the centuries, so that someone living in the USA today would conclude that the black struggle for civil rights has utterly failed. Why else draw a parallel between events that took place in St. Louis hundreds of years ago with more recent tragedies in the city, including the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014? The effect is to depress the reader into thinking that nothing has changed in the USA since the year 1619 or 1776, despite the context changing out of all recognition.

The idea presented in Chapter 9 of the book, that town planning in the early to mid 20th century was the implementation of institutional racism, is not supported by the facts. Very similar principles were applied to European cities at the time, many of which were virtually all-white in those days. The removal of poor people from down-town neighbourhoods in order to promote regeneration and private property interests isn’t necessarily racism in action. Here, Johnson is out of his depth, his lack of knowledge of town planning history all too apparent. That gentrification harmed black residents of St. Louis disproportionately is not evidence of racist design, because the same process has displaced poor whites in other cities where that demographic made up the majority of the urban underclass.

Similarly, the maintenance and safety problems which afflict high-rise housing projects of the post-World War II era affect all tenants regardless of race. These problems are just as bad in white Glasgow, Scotland as they were in the complex of eleven-storey towers in Pruitt-Igoe, St. Louis, now demolished. They are failures of modernism and the supposed economies of scale that were meant to derive from vertical living, not evidence of ‘racial capitalism’.

Johnson points out that women who lived in federal housing projects were penalised financially for having a man live with them in subsidised apartments. That is more usually considered to be an unintended consequence of welfare policy having a negative effect on family life. For the author, expecting black fathers to live with their own families is a discredited ‘racist, sexist and heteronormative’ notion. So, which is it? What is wrong with forbidding these men from living in the projects intended for single mothers if their presence is considered unnecessary by Theory?

In Chapter 10, Johnson refers to the federal housing projects in St. Louis as a ‘criminogenic environment’, as if the young black men he is writing about have no agency in their decision to commit crime. Once again, the tendency of the white progressive is to strip black people of the ability to choose for themselves, making them passive victims of a system entirely created by and operated for the benefit of white people only. Sorry, people with the characteristic of whiteness only.

In these circumstances, it is hard to imagine black success being possible, strongly suggesting that black people have been and still are being recruited as foot soldiers of the battle for social change that white progressives wish to bring about. Angela Davis, who gets a brief mention in this book as a visitor to St. Louis, was of course a student and special project of Herbert Marcuse.

As I completed reading The Broken Heart of America, I turned to the inside back cover to read the author’s biography on the paper flap. Walter Johnson, a white man, is Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. You’d think there would be at least one black person in the whole of the United States who knew black history, but apparently Harvard couldn’t find one. If that isn’t telling about America and the racism of progressive elites, I don’t know what is.

ISBN: 9780465064267

Published by: Basic Books

$35.00 hardback, $19.99 ebook or paperback, audiobook

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/walter-johnson/the-broken-heart-of-america/9780465064267/

Browsing the public library, I selected this 2014 book by Leo Hollis in part because of the bold claim shouting from the cover in capital letters. The publisher’s blurb promised to deliver “the unexpected reasons why living in the city can make us fitter, richer, smarter, greener, more creative - and, perhaps, even happier.” I read ‘Cities are Good For You’ in anticipation of having my own assumptions about, and experiences of, city life being challenged with evidence. Instead, I read a series of personal anecdotes about cities the author has visited, and a few places within those cities he enjoyed.

The Highline in New York City is held up by Hollis as a successful project of urban regeneration that has enabled neighbours to interact on a personal level, in a vehicle-free environment with places to sit and pass the time. These used to be standard features of any settlement until the advent of brutal modernity. My delve into the history of how and why the Highline was built in the first place, barely mentioned in Hollis’s book, puts this architect-driven gentrification scheme under an entirely different light.

The Highline was built because freight trains passing right through the city at street level were killing far too many people. A vastly expensive work-around for this failure of transportation planning, which itself caused the deaths of many construction workers, the Highline was obsolete soon after it was built. The factories and meat packing plants of New York had already started switching from rail to road transport by the time the Highline was nearing completion.

If the best example of urban regeneration that Hollis can come up with is an elevated pedestrian walkway, only necessary because city streets are so unpleasant and dangerous, his book is built on shaky ground from the start. The elevated walkways favoured by Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who pretentiously styled himself ‘Le Corbusier’, were an original feature of the Broadwater Farm housing project in north London. These concrete bridges enabled rioters to move quickly from block to block, over the heads of local police sent to control the mob.

Unfortunately, ‘Cities Are Good For You’ doesn’t get any better after that. The goal of this work seems to have been to reassure the author, the long list of endorsees, book reviewers in the mainstream media and the general public that the sacrifices they have made to live in cities are worthwhile. Be that financial hardship, alienation from your neighbours, lack of space, time wasted travelling short distances very slowly or becoming a victim of crime, these compromises are supposed to be worth suffering.

The key argument of this book appears to be that urban life, by placing millions of people very close to each other, offers limitless possibilities for random social interactions which make that life interesting and worthwhile. If you don’t like your family or the people you grew up with knowing your business, you can discard them in favour of short, shallow interactions with people you barely know, who can be discarded in turn as you tire of them.

Essentially, this trades real, meaningful relationships for an individually-centred approach in which choice of the people you spend time with trumps emotional bonds every time. It is the ‘glitter family’ in place of actual family, the tales of the city revolving around hook-up culture; plenty of sex, for some, but nothing that lasts. With ever-greater numbers of people around the world migrating to the cities, no wonder there is an epidemic of depression and medication use or abuse among the apparently wealthy and healthy.

The author’s apparent lack of experience or knowledge of town planning is revealed in the failure to ask the most basic question: if cities are good for us and acknowledged to be so, why do the most desirable neighbourhoods in Western cities resemble small towns and villages, with a human scale which enables travel on foot or by bicycle? Not only those European city districts which have retained their medieval street patterns, such as London’s Soho, old Amsterdam or central Prague, but those planned or accidental compact neighbourhoods in the USA such as Venice, California, Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco or Greenwich Village in New York.

The Covid-19 pandemic reminded us why humans have abandoned Western cities in waves since at least the Black Death, to be replaced later by new migrants. Cities are particularly vulnerable to the rapid spread of contagious disease, and completely dependent on daily imports of food and fuel to prevent steep decline into chaos, held together only by authoritarian rule, as we saw after Hurricane Katrina. This dependence on long supply chains makes city life particularly dangerous in a crisis, when people with weak and fleeting social bonds are more likely to turn against each other. We don’t tend to get much rioting, burning and looting these days in a rural village with an agricultural hinterland and plenty to eat.

Hollis’s fundamental mistake appears to have been based on a contrast drawn between the freedom, social (and sexual) opportunities of the city versus the quiet desperation of the suburb. Yet the 20th century suburb, with all its motor-dependency and curtain-twitching, is the outgrowth of the city, not an authentic settlement in its own right. It serves no purpose other than to provide more space and cleaner air for the people who spend their daytimes and their money in the city centre. This submissive relationship is why we use the word sub-urban, or ex-urban for those satellite housing tracts built further out. These are both examples of the urban.

‘Cities Are Good For You’ has done a disservice to its original premise, in that I was even less convinced after reading the book then when I began it. The failure to provide any meaningful metrics to back up the argument in the title of the work was a huge missed opportunity. If you live in a city and need reasons to convince you to stay, this book might make you feel better about your choices, for a while. Given that in the West at least, there are meaningful social, sexual and cultural opportunities available in all sizes of settlements, not to mention the possibility of travel, the absence of any credible argument in this book might mean it does not satisfy you for long. It is a 99 cent cheeseburger from a greasy joint on the city’s outskirts, not a feast for the senses.

The author can hardly be blamed for not knowing in 2014 that the Covid-19 pandemic would force permanent changes in working, dining and retail, away from 19th century patterns of commuting into city centres. However, this should have been predictable, given that broadband Internet has been available to many of us in the West for over twenty years now.

A long time ago, posh British store ‘Selfridges’ ran a sneery advertising campaign with the slogan “It’s Worth Living In London”, featuring black and white images of plebian rural life among elderly left-behind people. I was disappointed that well-known imprint Bloomsbury published such an insubstantial work in ‘Cities Are Good For You’. Perhaps the commissioning editors live in cities, and like Selfridges’ advertising department, thought that we all needed more convincing.

ISBN: 9781408843482

Published by: Bloomsbury Paperbacks

£15.19 ebook (EPUB & Mobi formats)

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cities-are-good-for-you-9781408826638/

During the UK’s coalition government of 2010-2015, austerity cuts meant that many jobs in officialdom considered non-essential were terminated. Former local authority employees had to get creative if they wished to keep their careers going. This article documents one such creative practice which has significant implications for the provision and cost of new housing in Britain.

The UK’s town planning system enables money for infrastructure to be collected from property developers. If a new housing estate in England or Wales includes a public park, for example, Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 provides a mechanism for local government to recover the cost of providing that infrastructure. In addition, some local authority areas in these two nations have introduced the ‘Community Infrastructure Levy’ enabled by Part 11 of the Planning Act 2008, which was a ‘New Labour’ initiative. (Scotland and Northern Ireland have similar developer contributions regimes).

Over time, local council officers have found new ways to use that extra money. In theory, Section 106 and Community Infrastructure Levy agreements only cover costs which are relevant to the development for which planning permission is sought. In recent years, contributions have been sought for all kinds of additional expenses, stretching the definition of ‘relevant’ to breaking point.

If you happen to live in the south London borough of Lambeth, the company that built your new flat will have been required to pay for a car hire club membership for the people that live in the building. And of course, the property developer is going to pass that cost directly on to you, whether you ride a bike to work, use the bus or don’t even have a driving licence.

The intended goal of this policy is to discourage you from having a car of your own, even if you are completely unaware of the connection between your ‘free’ membership of the car hire scheme and your rent increase. This is the consequence of ‘behavioural insights’ strategies; nudge-unit politics applied to housing supply. As the Local Government Association puts it, “Behavioural insights encourage people to make better choices for themselves and society.” You will be persuaded to change your lifestyle by the micro-management of local government, and you will be made to pay for the privilege of being manipulated. Edward Bernays would have been proud, had he lived to see this.

The property developer who refuses to pay these extra financial contributions to local government will be refused planning permission to build new homes, on the grounds that they had failed to comply with developer contributions policy. These contributions effectively form stealth taxes that the people renting or buying new properties are highly unlikely to know about. And the people who live in the new properties have no democratic input into the decision on which charges are levied, because these extra costs have already been incurred by the time they become residents.

The Supreme Court decision Wright v Resilient Energy Severndale Ltd & Forest of Dean District Council [2019] UKSC 53 re-affirmed that in the UK, planning permission is not meant to be bought or sold, and that financial inducements used to obtain permission to build are not lawful. However, because of the way that British justice works, if you don’t have the resources to mount a very specific legal challenge on a point of principle, it seems government and other authorities will carry on regardless.

You may be thinking that a few hundred pounds added to the price of a new property is a manageable amount for most people, but in practice, these extra charges are very wide-ranging and can add many thousands to the price of a new property. Consider the current Labour government’s pledge to enable the building of 1.5 million new houses during the lifetime of the current Parliament, multiplied by the thousands of pounds of additional costs levied by local councils on each new home. We see that the extra sums leveraged by the planning process quickly add up to billions of pounds; a fair chunk of change.

The additional contributions demanded include payments for ‘affordable housing’ projects, which mean people on very modest incomes subsidising the provision of housing for people who may be no worse off than themselves. A Freedom of Information request to a UK local authority to establish how much has been collected in ‘affordable housing’ contributions and how many affordable houses have actually been built with that money may prove revealing. (In the case of my small local authority area, the figures were £1.3 million in cash and zero affordable houses built, respectively).

Another commonly-sought contribution is money towards the provision of a new doctor’s surgery for the town in question. In the National Health Service system, general practitioner offices are private businesses, and so it is unclear why a new home owner should be paying for them, in addition to the National Insurance payments, income taxes and VAT they already pay. Services for children who might or might not live in the new houses are another popular demand from local planning authorities, despite the fact that the new residents will be bringing Council Tax revenue to the area, like any other person who moves there.

This fund-raising method is regressive taxation because it doesn’t fall on people who already own property, owner-occupiers and landlords buying up existing properties, or developers who convert commercial buildings into substandard flats under the UK’s ‘permitted development’ regime. Most affected are the home buyers and renters on low incomes for whom an extra £10,000 on the price of a property could make the difference between being able to afford a mortgage or rent, versus missing out on a new home.

Because new housing has to meet far more stringent building regulations than in the past, it is usually much more energy-efficient than Britain’s typical Victorian brick housing. That puts households which cannot afford a new home at a systematic disadvantage, as they will be paying far more for energy, and probably have to deal with long-term building issues such as damp, rot, draughts and leaks as well.

The additional costs being demanded from developers of entry-level housing, which the people who need it often can’t afford, mean that the market is biased towards upmarket properties even though the demand for more expensive houses is smaller and potentially more volatile. As a percentage, £10,000 of additional mitigation costs from the local authority on a £1 million house are not all that significant. On a £200,000 entry-level house, that percentage is five times greater, of course.

Quackers!

Some of these extra costs sought in mitigation payments are entirely of local government’s own making. Here’s just one example, with receipts.

It has long been a principle of Ingsoc that the proletariat should be enabled to walk across all the wild lands of Britain. The Kinder Scout mass trespass of 1932 was a landmark in the radical campaign for a ‘right to roam’ across private land in wild places. In the very same tradition, the Blair government introduced the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. More recently, a plan was hatched to create a complete path around the coast of England, not that your average person going out for a bit of fresh air would want to walk all 2,700 miles of it. (England doesn’t sound like it would be that big, but the coastline has lots of crinkly bits). This presented a problem: the undeveloped coast is a haven for all kinds of wildlife, protected under international law including the Ramsar Convention on wetlands, signed in 1971.

What is a local government employee looking for a new career opportunity to do about all this? There are existing charities such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds which are well-equipped to carry out wildlife conservation projects on the coastal margin. The most obvious measure, which is extremely cheap to implement, is to ban people walking their dogs through coastal areas and nature reserves where birds are likely to be nesting.

Instead, local government employees based in coastal regions of England cooked up an elaborate scheme designed to guarantee them jobs for life. A stealth tax on every new property, campsite and tent which passes through the planning system in designated coastal areas has been used to create ‘in-perpetuity’ funds so that former Council employees and others could be paid salaries as bird rangers. Those rangers are meant to ‘nudge’ local residents into responsible behaviour when walking on the coast, thereby making them ‘bird aware’. The beauty of this design is that there is a great deal of coastline around England, and so many birds to watch.

Under names such as ‘Bird Aware’ and ‘Bird Wise’, a great deal of money has been collected by the initial projects set up in England. On the central south coast, the project is called ‘Bird Aware Solent’. Its annual reports show that the organisation has collected from housing and tourism developers in the following years:

2014/15: £161,166

2015/16: £407,684

2016/17: £517,665

2017/18: £816,888

2018/19: £812,178

2019/20: £715,205

2020/21: £1,494,020

2021/22: £1,306,331

2022/23: £1,725,553

2023/24: £1,213,349

That adds up to £9.2 million over the first ten years; not bad for a local bird-watching project, eh? But that’s not all. Bird Aware Solent has also obtained grant funding, including £1.3 million provided from central government in the form of a ‘Local Growth Deal’.

According to its annual reports, at the 31st March 2024, the ‘in-perpetuity fund’ for Bird Aware Solent stood at £5,620,853, with another £353,601 in reserves. In other words, 65% of the money collected so far from home and tourism construction had been put away for a rainy day.

The corresponding project on the east coast is called ‘Bird Aware Essex’, which judging by its website seems more coy about reporting its financials. Bird Aware operates somewhat like a franchise, whereby the model can be set up by any consortium of local authorities. Bird awareness nudge schemes under other names operate in at least the Thames Basin, East Kent, North Kent and Dorset areas of the UK; projects which have gone almost completely unnoticed by the general public. If very few people know about these organisations, there can be very little scrutiny of them.

Let’s note that these ‘coastal recreation mitigation schemes’, as they are known, aren’t concerned with disturbance to wildlife on the sites where new houses are actually built: that is a separate matter and costs extra, of course.

Continuous vigilance is required to spot the stealth taxes being applied to every aspect of life in the UK, including new housing. Self-interested bureaucrats can be fired from public service, but history suggests they will re-emerge in another form, given the chance. It seems government has the unique ability to turn swans into ugly ducklings.

Joel Kotkin’s article for Quillette posited that town planning, understood as excessive regulation limiting residential property to urban areas, is the cause of the housing shortage in Western countries. An emerging neo-feudalism is said to be the result of the concentration of wealth amongst property oligarchs.

It has become a cliché to say that housing is in ‘crisis’, but the system is working exactly as intended for some. It would be more accurate to say that the West has ongoing equity redistribution leading to rapidly diminishing housing affordability for working people. This could be a return to a time when many ordinary people could not aspire to home ownership, and the majority of working-class income was used for rent.

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Is it feudal, though?

In the Middle Ages or medieval period, defined as ending with the Renaissance around the year 1500 AD, the European feudal system featured relatively weak central government. To issue money that would be trusted, monarchs needed control of gold and silver mines. Power was vested by the monarch in local lords of the land, who controlled specific territory, or fiefs, awarded in return for their fealty.

Even though corporations and asset managers are residential landlords today, they are reliant on government and central banks to guarantee the functioning and continuous growth of the market, not least in the creation of cheap money. Feudalism, inherently local power, based in the tangible wealth of gold and silver treasure, cannot be globalised or deliver infinite growth in asset prices, making it a poor analogy for contemporary systems of land ownership. Some tenants may imagine being a serf under the thumb of a feudal landlord, but that does not mean these systems are similar.

While globalised banks have taken an active role in finance for homes, this has involved loans to many millions of individuals as well as corporations. There is no fealty, other than the requirement to believe in the continuation of the current financial system. Corporate landowners, including asset managers, are merely following the money. Ironically, a renter complaining about the high cost of living in the city may have their pension invested with a fund which owns the property they live in, costing themselves today in the hope of a better-funded retirement. At a time when residential price growth outstrips other investment classes, while providing relative security compared to stocks, it is inevitable that passive income investments will pivot towards housing.

A country with a significant proportion of property owners cannot properly be called ‘feudal’. Housing in the West since the 1990’s resembles Deng Xiaoping’s consumer-communism, in which the citizen can buy as many properties as they can finance, but government defines all the parameters of the market. Deng’s youthful period of study in France, where he acquired penchants for both croissants and bloody dictatorship, was reportedly funded by his father’s profits as a landlord.

As recent experience in China has shown, the combination of centralised, top-down town planning and ‘market-led’ housing provision can lead to short-term oversupply. Germany’s capital, Berlin, has shown us that surplus homes following a building boom in a popular city are soon occupied by new arrivals.

Are ‘foreign’ buyers driving up prices?

Australian cities provide extreme examples of the Western housing affordability phenomenon. The Australian Taxation Office publishes annual data on overseas real estate transactions, showing that in the year to the end of June 2022, there were 4,228 residential purchases worth $3.9 billion and 2,349 sales with a value of $2.1 billion involving foreign owners. That might sound like a lot, but the sales turnover was around 535,000 homes in 2022 which suggests overseas purchasers represent well under 1 per cent of the market by volume. The eleven million homes in the country are now valued at around $10 trillion.

It should be no surprise that some of the money we spend on imported goods returns to the place where we live in the form of investment, by which time it is someone else’s money. If we take a look at the league table of the ‘world cities’ with the highest real estate to income ratios, they appear inversely proportional to their distance from the manufacturing city of Shenzhen. First in the league is Hong Kong, just across the Bay Bridge. Second is Sydney, within a nine-hour flight. However, considering the Asia region as a whole, there are plenty of more expensive places for an average citizen to live than Australia. If you think Sydney’s property price to income ratio of 15 is high, try Guangzhou or Beijing where you can double that number, or Shanghai where the ratio of home price to annual income is 37.

Politicians who know that immigration is necessary to compensate for falling birth rates and maintain economic growth have been reluctant to admit the effect on residential costs, even though demand from new arrivals is more than obvious in the housing market. If economic migrants including home buyers and would-be landlords arriving in Australia have access to virtually unlimited capital through the finance system, the country cannot build its way out of affordability problems.

It’s not just the number of immigrants which a country accepts each year; it’s the ability of new citizens to raise that finance, and their attitude to debt. The Italian fishermen who settled in Fremantle, Western Australia during the 1960’s lived in tin-roofed shacks when on land, and cooked their pasta in half seawater while out hunting lobster and octopus.

By contrast, property guru and mortgage broker Michael Xia, who arrived in Australia from Shanghai at the age of seven, purchased 62 properties over the last eleven years and is being paid $42k in rent per week by his tenants.

Since Australia currently has around 0.33% of the world’s population and a low development density, a pro-growth, pro-investor political regime will ensure that property values remain high, while Australia remains a relatively attractive and safe place to live and store wealth. Renters can’t be relied on to provide high rates of return on investment if they have the option of genuinely affordable home ownership, so don’t expect meaningful change in housing policy without national political change.

Why is Australia the worst in the West?

Certainly, housing is less affordable in real terms than it has been for a very long time. Neil Monnery's 2011 book ‘Safe as Houses?’ used historical, inflation-adjusted property price data for multiple cities, in some cases going back centuries, to evidence that a Western housing market bubble had inflated out of all proportion to the long-term trend. That warning wasn’t heeded, and Australia’s housing became the least affordable in the Anglosphere.

In the following ten years, the price of residential property in Sydney and Hobart more than doubled. Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Canberra also saw rises ranging from 56% to 86% relative to 2011-12, while prices in Perth rose by a relatively modest 20% over that decade. Of the eight capitals, only Darwin saw steady house prices during the period. While Sydney prices for city homes peaked in January 2022, they have risen 6.8% over the last year and are now within 1.4% of that previous high.

According to the Australian Taxation Office, in 2023 all of the top five professions owning investment properties were working in healthcare, including surgeons, psychiatrists and dentists. That suggests the bourgeoisie still have a role to play in the housing market, thanks to government incentives including negative gearing (offsetting property costs against personal income tax) and capital gains rules which favour property acquisition, such as the 50% tax discount for Australian residents who own an investment property for at least 12 months.

For comparison, the United Kingdom began phasing out perks for wealthier, higher-rate taxpayers who own mortgaged investment property in 2017, and prevented property finance being directly set against rental income from 2020 onwards. The UK also charges higher rates of capital gains tax if you are a higher-rate taxpayer (recently 24% versus 18%) and has also abolished tax perks for owners of properties used for short-term letting.

Accelerating inequality in property ownership is a political choice, not merely an inevitable result of supply and demand. If the property-owning class consistently chooses to vote, and renters do not vote in the same numbers, political parties will support measures which increase investment in property, including by people who have no intention of living in the houses they buy. Perpetual house price increases are now taken as economic fact, and so any political party which jeopardises the value of these assets is asking to lose the next election.

The role of town planning in supply

As a researcher and an advocate for local people fighting inappropriate development, I’ve noticed many politicians blaming democratic town planning for a lack of housing affordability. Town planning is really applied human geography, complementary to the related professions of surveying and architecture. It attempts to find rational solutions to the practical problems of town and city growth, and avoid the mistakes of the past.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, railway systems and emerging private car ownership for the middle classes meant people were prepared to live miles out of town, even though they no longer had any connection to agriculture. Building of low-density housing began to spread along arterial roads, the countryside seemingly obliterated by endless bungalows and garages. Suburbs were cleaner and more spacious than the grimy industrial cities, but made their new residents socially isolated as well as motor-dependent. Zoning as used in Australia and the USA is the simplest system of town planning, leading to a lack of building type diversity within a zone.

In Australia, the New South Wales government has recently introduced controversial planning reforms, enabling increased densities and taller buildings in historic suburbs. In a classic case of right problem, wrong solution, this policy change is likely to increase the value of suburban homes still further, as they now have a speculative development value in addition to being an appreciating residential asset.

Knocking down spacious owner-occupied homes to build six-storey rental flats will certainly increase population density, while actively reducing living space per person and doing nothing to redistribute equity. Whether your new landlord is a private corporation or the government makes little difference if you have no choice but to rent; to misquote Ida Auken you may not be happy, but you definitely will own nothing.

Incentives in property development

Many of the housing projects which get the green light from local government are not even started. Before a development project reaches the municipal town planning department for evaluation, there are at least four main parties involved: landowner, speculator, builder and financier. The interests of these parties don’t fully align, and a project with permission to build may fall apart before a single brick is laid.

In the suburbs and rural areas where greenfield sites proposed for development are typically farmland, that property may have belonged to the same family for generations. When asset prices are rising fast, the landowner has no incentive to dispose of a substantial portion of the property, unless they believe the market is overinflated and just ahead of a crash. Like any other asset with finite supply, such as gold, a rising market with good prospects for the future will generally favour a hold position. The analogy with manufactured products such as cars, in which increased demand drives supply, just doesn’t work for land and real estate.

When prices stabilise and don’t appear to be rising any further, that is usually the time to consider a land sale. As a fixed asset can only be sold once, an equally valid position is to hold the asset indefinitely regardless of price movements, while there is no pressing need for liquidity. As long as that land brings in at least some income to cover maintenance costs, such as growing food, it’s a reasonably reliable store of wealth. It costs nothing to build nothing at all, as long as land ownership is maintained with its potential for development.

Meanwhile, the speculative property developer, the supplier of materials, the construction company and the bank make no money whatsoever if building doesn’t go ahead. That’s why some parties to the transaction are lobbying politicians for local planning systems to be gutted, relying on the public’s assumption that increased land supply and re-zoning will increase affordability. Democratic oversight of the development site allocation process is too good at maintaining the price of well-situated, high-quality land in an open and transparent way. Property developers only make money if they can buy low and sell high, which usually depends on information asymmetry between the buyer and seller of land.

It’s easier to blame the democratic town planning system, and call for rapid deregulation, when the real issue is a government-made inflationary spiral that acts as a strong disincentive to ordinary people saving for a home, buying that home early in adult life, and paying off a mortgage or loan before retirement. If that inflationary spiral also makes land owners reluctant to release land too quickly, lest it double in cash value in the space of a few years, the effect is compounded. Yet the price of residential property relative to the feudal currency of solid gold is stable over the long term, with gold in strong demand since the credit crunch of 2007-2008.

Top-down site allocation for development, bypassing the local democratic planning process, doesn’t deliver new housing unless landowners wish to sell, or are forced to. If a centralised, authoritarian planning system and private sector building booms delivered long-term affordability, Chinese cities should have the lowest cost housing of anywhere in the world, but the reality is the opposite. Any government will struggle to meet affordable housing pledges unless it takes the highly unlikely step of financial reform, and puts the equity interests of ordinary people before bank profits or would-be landlords. Rapid house price inflation has to be tackled like any other form of inflation, as a sign that something has gone wrong in the economy, and it’s not a problem that can be solved by taking the democracy out of town planning.

As for technology being the solution, the UK’s experience of building the absurdly expensive HS2 project offers a warning to anyone thinking high-speed rail is the answer. Building a new railway into the heart of an existing city, with thousands of properties to negotiate or demolish has proven to be near-impossible in a democratic society in which government does not simply seize land. Electric cars require highway and grid infrastructure typically absent from rural areas with housing growth potential. Whichever form of motorised transport is advocated for, the problem of city sprawl has no simple fixes.

What’s next for Australian housing?

The conditions for another housing construction boom can be created using the levers at government’s disposal. It can tear up planning legislation designed to make communities more sustainable, in the pursuit of growth at any cost. It can keep money flowing through the banks to start more capital-intensive development projects. It can subsidise speculative development by building infrastructure using tax dollars. It can keep open borders for anyone bringing sufficient money or skills into the country. And it can divert money from under-performing universities into trade schools so that more young people learn to build houses, rather than protest uselessly about inadequate housing supply.

What government cannot do with a pro-growth agenda is resolve the economic tension between landowners, developers, potential residents and would-be landlords. Government could fully utilise the potential of the democratic planning system to become an enabler of residential property construction in communities with productive agricultural hinterlands, resilient against global supply chain shocks. A home could once again become a place to live, thrive and build a family, not just an investment. But that vision works against speculator and landlord interests, where perpetual passive income from property is the only meaningful objective, and banks are the enablers.

If we are to make a meaningful difference to the status quo, we need to emphasise affordable home ownership in healthy and sustainable self-contained settlements of a human scale, not just ‘housing’ on the suburban and exurban fringes of megacities. That implies radical financial reform and a return to the original principles of town planning advocated by the Garden City movement, rather than mere tweaks to the crude system of zoning, and government imposition of higher building targets.

My elderly neighbour Terry, who died during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, once told a story from his life as a salesman in 1960's Britain. Terry was selling confectionery wholesale, and he had somehow managed to get into the outer office of the formidable Jack Cohen, founder of the Tesco retail empire. After lengthy persuasion, he was called in to see Jack, clutching his briefcase of samples. The deal was done, and Terry got his bonus.

Terry was a Londoner, but his boss was a diplomat at the Czech embassy; these were communist confections. The Czech government of that era couldn't be seen making a direct approach to a capitalist like Jack Cohen, but it needed hard currency. So, Terry acted as a middleman between the two systems. Jack no doubt made a healthy profit, and the biscuit-eaters of Britain never knew their sugary snacks were baked behind the Iron Curtain.

Learned helplessness

It's a given that almost everything is made in China these days, from textiles to high tech. Some in the West assume that Chinese people aren't smart or creative enough to figure out what to make, but perhaps because they are a little dull or too poor to say 'no', they are willing to do factory work for very little money. This is of course a racist stereotype, but also the standard explanation for the state of globalised trade today. It's the trope of Western brains supposedly directing Chinese hands, implied in the smug slogan 'Designed in California' emblazoned on an iThing.

This tired trope is apparently paradoxical; how did Western billionaire capitalists come to be co-dependent with a communist state which has reiterated its commitment to Marxism in the contemporary doctrine of Xi Jinping Thought?

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Several pundits have attempted to give a fitting name to the political system that the West has today. In his 1980 book, Bertram Gross called it 'friendly fascism'. More recently, short-term Greek finance minister 'Yanis' Varoufakis has been telling everyone it is 'techno-feudalism', while Joel Kotkin's variation is 'neo-feudalism'.

In case you've been seduced by the idea that the world is run by a handful of white male billionaires who pull all the strings of puppet governments, which would be called a conspiracy theory if it were not so mainstream a concept on the political Left, I'd like you to try a thought experiment with me.

Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a gigantic Amazon warehouse, built with the support of tax money because it has brought employment to a low-income neighbourhood. Tall racks of palletised consumer goods spread in all directions, as far as you can see in the dim light. Now imagine that every box in that warehouse containing goods produced under the watchful eye of the Chinese Communist Party regime suddenly vanished. What do you see after that? In my mind, I see a lot of empty shelves.

If your thought experiment had the same result as mine, this implies our 'feudal' rulers including Jeff Bezos are only middle-men for the CCP. They have been richly rewarded for raising the standard of living of the Chinese people, by accelerating the diversion of Western capital and consumer spending into communist-controlled factories. This is a reversal of the post World War II period ending with the 1980's, in which only Westerners had a wide choice of consumer goods, and communist citizens queued for scarce bread or rice. Should Bezos seriously fall out with the CCP for any reason, the source of his great wealth would be switched off overnight, and he's not the only billionaire bro in that position.

All companies of significant size depend on tacit CCP approval if they wish to ship physical products, including anything with a chip or a battery in it. Despite their discoveries of electricity, general-purpose computing and semiconductors, the days when the Western countries which had given birth to Volta, Ohm and Hertz could boast pioneering hardware manufacturers such as Ferranti or Olivetti are long gone.

The trans-ideological corporation

At least since the now-discredited President Nixon made his visit to China in 1972, many other politicians have followed his attempt to form commercial and political alliances between East and West. As I write, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, second in command to the Prime Minister, is in China for talks which will enable more imports from the CCP regime, while the UK's domestic economy is hardly flourishing.

More than fifty years ago, Samuel Pisar, Holocaust survivor and youthful communist positively appraised the 'trans-ideological corporation', which has no allegiance to any particular political system. Having previously served in the Kennedy administration, Pisar's 1970 book 'Coexistence and Commerce' would inspire Nixon's approach to China.

British readers may remember Pisar as Robert Maxwell's lawyer, while Americans might know he was Steve Jobs' legal representative and Anthony Blinken's stepfather.

The trans-ideological corporation is the perfect partner for an authoritarian communist regime which can use its absolute power to deliver goods for export on time, at any level of quality required, and at a price which no Western capitalist can match, let alone beat.

The left-right continuum of conventional politics offers no enlightenment when examining the trans-ideological corporation. Neither does a classical Marxist analysis which pits capital against labour. Instead, the transnational consumer-communist regime aims to provide the greatest happiness for the proletariat by providing it with all of the consumer goods that capitalism offered, with none of the inefficiencies of bourgeois multi-party liberal democracies.

The Dengism of the 1970's and 80's has gone global, and it is delivering its promise of an improved standard of living for billions, moving far more people out of poverty than capitalism ever managed to. (Please note the improvements in living standards ascribed to free markets over the last fifty years or so also coincide with the post-Nixon era).

The losers are the free-thinking dissidents, the principled, the religious observers with their contradictory belief systems, and the reactionaries who refuse to accept the new hegemony. Even they will benefit from plentiful consumer goods at low, low prices.

The ecological impact of this rampant consumer-communism, with Chinese coal plants burning around the clock to power 'green' technology production, is externalised, so that it doesn't figure in the ticket price of those goods. We can take bets on whether the ability of the planet to support human life will end before everyone on this planet gets the keys to a Chinese-made electric car.

In case you think this is just hyperbolic Sinophobia, I am not anti-Chinese. The chaos of the Great Leap Forward, while deadly for millions, was a short-lived speed wobble in the context of a 6,000 year old Chinese culture, a human-made disaster which the CCP has learned from and overcome. I commend Chinese ingenuity in its dialectical synthesis of capitalism and socialism to deliver the benefits of both systems worldwide, with the assistance of Western fellow travellers in business, media and the academy.

It should be obvious by now that the West has had its own Cultural Revolution over the last ten years or more, with denouncing, shaming and ostracisation all the rage, and British police checking your thinking in preference to addressing bourgeois concerns such as property crime.

It's just a pity that the drawbacks of both systems have also been synthesised - the loss of the natural world, and inherent authoritarianism - but it seems most people don't care about freedom or environmental downsides as long as they get what they want from the online store.

There may be trouble ahead

Peter Zeihan's theory that China faces imminent collapse, which has received millions of views due to his appearances on well-known podcasts, is, as politely as I can put it, counter-factual. If China collapsed, so would the West, given its dependent relationship. The CCP's ruthless authority means it will ensure China and its favoured people survive, by any means necessary. It has all the capital, resources and the production capacity to do so, and it isn't short of labour either.

Consumer-communism faces two political challenges, and neither will emerge from the trans-ideological corporation or within the CCP itself. The first is from fundamentalist religion. For example, an Islamic caliphate provides an alternative political structure, non-Marxist in origin, to the CCP. However, if we accept James Lindsay's proposition that Marxism is a theology and communism is its religious practice, there is potential for an Islamic caliphate or other religious bloc to co-exist peacefully with a consumer-communist world, including trade in goods and raw materials.

If we believe the goal of Dengism and now Xi Jinping Thought is to provide the best possible outcome for China's Han majority, then Islamic, Christian, Hindu or Buddhist regions can flourish indefinitely as long as they do not impinge on China's unity, power and prosperity. China's religious minorities may continue to suffer, lest they have any ideas about secession or joining with their counterparts across borders.

The second significant challenge to consumer-communism comes from national anarchism, which is both anti-globalisation and anti-authoritarian, and therefore completely incompatible with the hegemony of an alliance between the CCP and trans-ideological Western corporations. Given that anarchists are anti-government, they are necessarily anti-global-government, and the nation offers a potential organising unit of resistance. A relatively small community is ineffectual against a superpower, as China's eleven million Uyghurs have found out to their cost.

Indeed, when Varoufakis was attacked and beaten in Athens in 2023 he denied that anarchists were responsible, despite the evidence that this was exactly who had targeted him for assault. The former Greek finance minister cannot ascribe a political motive to this attack because the facts don't fit his 'techno-feudalism' theory. I have written previously about how the British political and media class ignored evidence of national anarchist involvement in the UK's summer 2024 riots, even though evidence of this was published by the media itself.

Costs and benefits

On a purely pragmatic level, Westerners don't like air pollution and toxic waste; they have successfully exported the problem for others to deal with. Consider the electric car, which delivers the clean air Californians have demanded since emissions regulations of the 1960's and 1970's, while relocating its environmental impacts elsewhere, and doing precisely nothing to address the failed city planning of the Golden State. The wildfires this year which have yet again destroyed large areas of Los Angeles are just another symptom of that failure, which has more than outweighed any local air pollution benefit from electric vehicles.

Of course, every regime has its elite, and the most powerful men in the world can see eye-to-eye regardless of the colour of their flag. They live much the same lifestyle, flying from meeting to meeting by private jet, or where landing strips are not available, helicopter. State security is private security when you own a country. In June 2021, a small corner of Britain was turned into a police state for the G7 meeting in Cornwall, with a super-lockdown for local residents enforced by a reported 6,000 peace officers.

The apparent convergence between East and West is not happening at the level of public politics. We can point to embarrassments like Twitter founder Jack Dorsey donating ten million US dollars to academic Ibram X. Kendi as examples of corporate virtue signalling, rather than a serious attempt to synthesise capitalism with revolutionary action. Kendi, formerly Henry Rogers, could have chosen any middle name beginning with any letter of the alphabet. It seems revolutionaries with an X in their name are like Ghostbusters: you thought the original was worth watching, but you have doubts about the reboots.

Instead, the convergence is taking place at the level of personally identifiable data. Have you ever wondered why identity politics is dominating discourse, given that we all know humans are far more complex and subtle than can be described in a series of boxes for ticking? While advertising has been manipulating Western culture at least since the invention of the newspaper and magazine, ads have now reached their zenith. The most powerful tech companies in the world, and by extension the most powerful individuals, essentially run advertising delivery platforms.

This is not about meeting human needs. In the Western world of financial abundance, the only limit to economic growth is that most people don't need any more stuff. Governments have to pay you to scrap your perfectly good car, just to incentivise you to buy another. It is not the Earth's dwindling raw materials, the availability of labour or even capital itself which are the fuel for the economic engine today; it is personally targetted advertising.

Yet the data science of ads isn't really interested in getting to know us personally; for the time being, it needs a level of abstraction so that we can be categorised into marketing niches. This is way beyond the simple ABC1 categories of yore; these are multiple intersecting identities of race, class, gender, age and location. If this sounds familiar, it is because contemporary politics reflect the lived experience of the data-driven app, whether that is social media, dating or the daily news.

Personal data holds value better than Bitcoin. Britain's citizens were recently surprised to find out that they now need to opt-out of having their medical records sold to third parties. Not their generalised health statistics for population-level modelling, but their personally identifiable records from National Health Service databases, collected by their local family doctor.

If only the East German regime had something like Facebook, it wouldn't have needed the Stasi. Instead of waiting for your children to denounce you, your own messages to family and friends will now do the job. Marxist governments had an insatiable need for data, but the cost of acquisition and processing was too high for the system to cope with. Recruiting half of the population to spy on the other half generates a ridiculous amount of paperwork, as Berliners discovered in 1989 when they broke into Stasi headquarters to read their own files. That's what we now call a big data problem.

Fortunately, Western capitalism and Chinese communism have united to provide the high-tech answer. A Chinese facial recognition system is unironically named Skynet, after the tyrannical computer system in Hollywood movie 'The Terminator'. One guy's dystopia is another's utopia, it seems.

We've sat back and watched as the Chinese middle class and its overseas investment grew dramatically as a result of Western spending on Chinese goods, kidding ourselves this meant that China was being Westernised - as if the significant aspect of our culture was the cars, the refrigerators and the gadgets.

Big data is needed as much to drive sales as it is for surveillance, and that's why convergence is happening at the data level. China is achieving the materialist goals of communism by outcompeting the West on production and investment, essentially beating capitalism at its own game. This is an iterative improvement of communism which has learned from the deadly mistakes of the Mao era, but retains a Marxist analysis at its core. That's why the old labels don't seem to make much sense; this isn't your grandad's communism, or your grandad's state capitalism for that matter.

Don’t expect freedom

There has been a cross-pollination whereby Chinese students have been attending Western universities for decades, and (some) Western academics are teaching critical theories derived from Marxist analysis. The seeds are sown for a political convergence in the generation to come. However, it would be a mistake to assume this means China will liberalise on issues such as personal freedom. The centre of gravity cannot be assumed to be in the West, drawing China closer to it.

Our politicians have been preoccupied with class interest, seeking to maximise the advantages of their particular supporters over the other lot. Rentier capitalism delivers return on investment, but does not appear to set strategic goals for the success of capitalism itself. Perhaps Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' turned out to be a phantom limb.

It is our setting up of bosses against workers and landlords against tenants which gives consumer-communism its competitive edge. For example, Britain has a housing crisis despite there being enough houses for almost everyone, because market manipulation has strangled affordability.

Unlike the Chinese electronic manufacturing city of Shenzhen, much of the housing in Britain is more than a hundred years old and has already been paid for several times over, yet many people on average wages can't afford to buy or even rent a basic British house. Job creation in the West is a risky investment when your competitor is streets ahead in efficiency and has no objection to using forced labour, so it seems the West's surplus capital has accumulated in real estate.

After adjusting for inflation, the average house price in Britain has more than doubled since former chancellor Gordon Brown granted political independence to the Bank of England in 1997. Yet in many cases it is the exact same house as it was when the previous mortgage was taken out 25 years ago. The practical implication is that British workers can't afford to move to where the work is, creating a sclerotic economy in which half the country is living on state support and the other half can't recruit to keep businesses running.

Western politicians need to acknowledge that consumer-communism is a strategic threat from within, not from China as a state or ethnic Chinese people. The blatant Sinophobia of our representatives who rail against Huawei is rooted in obsolete Cold War notions of competing geopolitical forces. Companies like Huawei wouldn't have a toe-hold in the West if it wasn't for capitalists forcing down the wholesale price of consumer electronics in the pursuit of margin. As they say in Shenzhen, every Western inventor that arrives with a new product idea wants high labour and environmental standards in Chinese manufacturing. It's that inventor's Western financial backers that insist on the lowest possible prices, and that is how exploitation happens.

Regardless of the marketing materials tailored for regional buyers in their own languages and idioms, consumer-communism is transnational. It makes no difference whatsoever if your smartphone or router is branded as American; it is likely to be made in the exact same Chinese factory. In fact, the only reason that people can tell the difference between a Huawei product and their more familiar devices is the increased confidence in Asia which has put a Chinese brand name on the casing.

Although Shenzhen is just across the bay from Hong Kong, these two manufacturing cities remain worlds apart. As a new settlement filled with immigrants from all over China, the lingua franca in Shenzhen is Mandarin, rather than Cantonese as generally spoken on the other side of the Deep Bay bridge. Those young people still fighting against the odds for democracy in the 'semi-autonomous region' of Hong Kong are fighting for us, not just themselves.

Our politicians have been seduced by the power of big data, but the days when they could take charge of it are over. Western governments are just one more segment of customers for transnational goods and services. This has led to the absurd situation where the British state pays more for cloud hosting to Amazon than that company pays in taxes on all of its activities in Britain. Along with paying for infrastructure for e-commerce, such as the highways leading to huge warehouses built on greenfield sites, the Western state is subsidising its own descent into irrelevance. It could be an indicator of these states' subordination to consumer-communism that the tax reforms for transnational data giants announced by the G7 could actually result in decreased tax revenue.

War is not the answer

At the height of the Cold War, Eisenhower warned us of the danger presented by the military-industrial complex. Consumer-communism is a different but no less drastic threat to the values which we assumed were entrenched in our culture, and just like that complex is as much a threat from within as it is from without. Our long-established human rights organisations are asleep at the wheel. They have abandoned their stated missions and stoked division in the West through the promotion of identity politics, and lobbying for highly selective causes.

Consumer-communism might not be an external military threat to the West, except in local territorial disputes; why invade a country, when you can simply buy it? When former British prime minister David Cameron invited Xi Jinping to the pub near official residence Chequers for a pint of beer in 2015, he might not have anticipated that the pub would be sold to a Chinese investment group a year later. China has advanced the evolution of international socialism because it has adapted to reality in the harshest terms possible, maintaining social control throughout the years of famine, disaster and beyond.

In case you've bought into the idea that China has embraced a form of capitalism, you might like to reflect on the cases of Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping. They were executed in 2009 by the Chinese state for supplying powdered milk contaminated with melamine, which had killed six babies. By comparison, there were around 1000 additional suicides in the United Kingdom alone following the 2008 financial crisis, according to research published in the British Medical Journal, and it seems there is yet to be a reckoning for those individual tragedies.

Perhaps it was the 2008 crash which convinced Western elites that free markets and democracy were over-rated. The behaviour of European and American governments during the Covid-19 pandemic illustrated both their willingness to adopt authoritarian rule on the flimsiest of pretexts, and their total dependence on CCP-authorised supply chains for even basic items such as medical-grade face masks.

The West can fully embrace the emerging global consensus on the subordinate status of the individual in the pursuit of state ambitions, which is to say the ambitions of the technocratic elite which controls the state. Or, it can reaffirm the Enlightenment values of humanity, enquiry and scepticism in the face of ideology. No half-measures are possible if the free people of the world are to have a sustainable alternative.

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The part of London, England known as Tottenham had been mostly farmland until the Victorian era, except for the neighbourhood of Bruce Grove with its Georgian villas. This street leads to Bruce Castle which once belonged to Roland Hill, the inventor of the postage stamp. In those days, Broadwater Farm was the name of a dairy farm nearby. The Stoke Newington & Edmonton Railway, opened in 1872, brought Cockneys out of the East End to settle eight miles north in newly-built terraced housing, where they mingled with Russian-speaking migrants seeking political asylum or just a better life in Britain.

In 1909, the ‘Tottenham Outrage’ left four dead after a police shoot-out with Latvian anarchist thieves. This was a precursor to 1911’s better-known Siege of Sydney Street, in which the young Winston Churchill deployed troops on the streets of London to defeat another gang of expropriating Baltic radicals.

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Today, the working-class neighbourhoods of Tottenham and Edmonton are still known for being rough, and politically charged. A friend of mine who put a Tottenham address on his curriculum vitae could never get a job interview, despite the fact that he was qualified with skills that were in high demand. He changed his CV to show his address as ‘Bruce Grove’ instead. It seemed prospective employers didn’t know that is an area of Tottenham, and he started getting job offers immediately.

Tottenham’s modern reputation was in some respects deserved. The 1985 riot at the Broadwater Farm housing project, in which unarmed policeman Keith Blakelock was stabbed 43 times and almost decapitated, made some people wary of the neighbourhood’s residents. A black woman, Cynthia Jarrett, had died of a heart attack during a police raid on her home, triggering one of the UK’s most serious riots of the period. Hard-left union activist Bernie Grant, who had become the leader of the local council that year, departed from the usual protocol by appearing to endorse the “bloody good hiding” that his constituents had given the police. The progressive left including Grant also worked successfully to overturn the convictions of three men imprisoned for the murder of PC Blakelock. That crime remains unsolved after almost four decades.

Bernie Grant was one of the three black Members of Parliament elected to represent the Labour Party in 1987, the first MPs of African heritage in modern Britain. He was also a Pan-Africanist, involved with the state of black communities all over the world, not just the multi-racial neighbourhood he was to represent. That work included becoming the chairperson of the African Reparations Movement in the UK. I met Grant in person a few times at local community events. Grant’s biography, written by his schoolteacher father Eric, is available on the Internet Archive.

While in Parliament in 1989, Grant made a hip-hop record in aid of the African National Congress, but this was no charity fund-raiser; it was a call to arms. The lyrics were about the situation in South Africa and Angola, with Grant rapping about the ‘freedom fighters’ on the 16th parallel. At the time, with Nelson Mandela still in prison, the hard left’s solution for apartheid was to send as many automatic weapons to the African proletariat as possible, shipping these guns via communist regimes such as East Germany.

The basic idea was that a civil war would be won at the cost of an unspecified number of black lives, and majority rule would emerge dialectically out of the chaos, with South Africa presumably becoming a Soviet satellite state just as communism was collapsing in Europe. I know that progressives calling for bloody vengeance and communism is on-trend today, but back in the 1980’s that was not the sort of thing a member of Parliament would normally do. It does remind us that Bernie Grant’s socialist revolution was international as well as local. I still have my copy of that hip-hop record. I rate the B-side instrumental.

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Generations of migration

Grant was a migrant from Guyana on the South American continent who arrived in the UK in 1963. Because of its status as a British colony, Guyana was linked to the transatlantic slave trade, including the production of sugar. You may have heard of Demerara sugar, named after a place in Guyana. Because of these plantation workers brought against their will from Africa, Guyana was considered part of the Caribbean, culturally speaking.

The Empire Windrush was a German ship seized by the British military at the end of World War II – to the victor go the spoils. It arrived in London from the Caribbean on 22nd June 1948 with 800 migrants on board, giving its name to the ‘Windrush generation’. Some of those young men and their families came to Tottenham.

Due to previous generations of migration from the East, Tottenham was a Jewish neighbourhood before it became a black neighbourhood. When Jews had arrived in the Port of London during the 19th century, they settled close to the docks in slum neighbourhoods such as Whitechapel. As they earned a little more money, they moved further out to the Victorian suburbs which included Tottenham, Stamford Hill and Golders Green in North London, to get away from the smoke and the soot of the East End.

Tottenham Hotspur is the UK’s premier-league Jewish football club. It used to be owned by electronics entrepreneur Alan Sugar, who’s now more famous for hosting UK TV’s version of ‘The Apprentice’. In Yiddish, the word for sugar is of course ‘Zucker’, as in Zuckerberg – the sugar hill. I never met Baron Sugar, but his chauffeur nearly ran me over in his Rolls Royce, identified by its number-plate ‘AMS 1’, coming out of the White Hart Lane football stadium one time. It might have been ironic for Bernie Grant, whose ancestors had likely worked on the plantations in Guyana, that the wealthiest Jew in Tottenham was called ‘Sugar’.

In the 1990’s, there were still two bagel bakeries on Tottenham High Road and several of my neighbours worked in the garment trade, using tailoring skills that Jewish migrants from the East had passed down to their descendants. Alan Sugar’s father was one of those London tailors.

The multiple meanings of ‘reparation’

When the Berlin Wall was demolished and Germany subsequently reunified, further claims for reparations were made by the Jewish community for losses of property during World War II. New documents became available as the archives of the Warsaw Pact state which had been the German ‘Democratic’ Republic were opened up. Officially, there were no National Socialists in East Germany.

‘Reparations’ had been a widely-used word in English after the First World War, when the Weimar Republic found itself having to pay for losses incurred due to the deposed Kaiser’s campaigns. The treaty reparations obtained from the German state in 1919 onwards included money for the victorious governments, territory reclaimed for neighbouring states, and limitations for the size of the German armed forces. There was no need to wait decades for results, because the Allied Powers had the means to enforce the settlement imposed.

Resentment about the German people having to pay these reparations was frequently cited as a motive for National Socialism. Claims for reparations arising from the Second World War from the surviving Jewish community were like those in the Treaty of Versailles and other treaties, in one respect; they arose from relatively recent events, still in living memory.

In other respects, these two types of reparation were very different: Jewish families claimed compensation for specific and personal items they had lost, such as a painting by Gustav Klimt. The story of the recovery of just such a painting was portrayed by Anglo-Russian actress Helen Mirren in the 2015 movie ‘Woman in Gold’. These claims for reparations after the Second World War lasted many decades in some cases, due to the reluctance you might expect to hand over money and property that had been looted from Jewish people. The opportunity for reparations after the end of Soviet communism in Europe meant some of the claims by Holocaust survivors and their relatives were still ongoing in the 1990’s.

One case I’m familiar with took place in the town of Ladenburg in southern Germany, where Carl Benz invented the automobile. This ancient Roman town had a small Jewish community of around a hundred people in the 1930’s. A family home on Bahnhofstrasse was seized by the Gestapo and the contents looted, including another valuable painting that hung on one of the walls. The Hirsch family was able to produce a photograph which showed relatives standing in this room of the house, with this specific painting in the background, providing a clear documentary link to the ownership of that painting before the National Socialist regime stole it. That house became Gestapo headquarters for the Ladenburg district, and it is still the town’s police station today.

When Bernie Grant talked about reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, perhaps the first person with a seat in the Houses of Parliament to do so, this was a quite different concept under the same name. He wasn’t talking about reparations for personal property, or for recent events. He was making a claim on behalf of the descendants of Africans who were exploited by the transatlantic slave trade in general, hundreds of years earlier, and the return of cultural artefacts to their countries of origin. This was a different sense of the word ‘reparations’ than that used by his Jewish constituents regarding losses by family in Germany. Enslaved Africans such as Olaudah Equiano weren’t allowed private property, which was simply taken from them, as he related in The Interesting Narrative.

Documentary evidence of specific property that had been stolen from people in that slave trade was not generally available, and that wasn’t really the point. The claim was not for property, but the indignity of the slave trade, the economic harms to Africans, and the fact that people had been taken from their native lands to work on plantations. Because those individuals had been treated as property in the chattel slavery system, the argument was made that compensation was due. After all, Britain had compensated the slave owners for their lost ‘property’ upon outlawing the trade. There were claims on behalf of descendants of slaves, those Africans who had died on the sea journey, by the Caribbean nations where slaves had been made to work against their will, and the African regions which had lost so many people.

Bernie Grant’s ideas about transatlantic slave trade reparations are now mainstream in the United States, the Caribbean and elsewhere, more than twenty years after his death. In October 2024, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer agreed to start discussions on reparations with the Commonwealth of former British colonies. Given that it’s Starmer involved, we might expect nothing more than discussions. Alternatively, he might do something radical to assuage his progressive guilt, like when he handed over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius against the will of the islands’ former residents.

How much is enough?

Various attempts have been made to put a precise figure on the amount of money owed to each descendant of the transatlantic slave trade, a very different task to putting a value on a painting which may still be hanging on some gallery wall. How does anybody put a price on human dignity, or make a meaningful calculation of economic loss over centuries? For the United Nations, that figure is more than $24 trillion US dollars for Britain alone, just one of the countries involved in that particular slave trade.

The details of who will pay this sum are not clear. We can put a valuation on a sugar company, but putting a price on human dignity and the dislocation of a huge number of people from their land of origin is much more challenging to quantify. Arguably, putting a price on a human effectively uses the techniques of the slave trade to make the unquantifiable, quantifiable. Should government step in and use tax money to compensate certain Africans and not others, depending on whether or not applicants for reparations can prove colonial ancestry? That would be controversial in a community like Tottenham which now includes migrants who have arrived directly from Africa, not via the Caribbean plantations. If you compensate someone for crimes against their ancestors in general, rather than compensation for specific private property, how much is enough?

Was it Jewish constituents being paid reparations for the injustices that their families had suffered which inspired Bernie Grant to claim reparations on behalf of Africans? The demand for justice is similar, but the context of the transatlantic slave trade is different from the European wars of the 20th century. Neither the black community in Britain, the Caribbean nations nor the modern African states in the region from which those slaves came have the leverage that the Allied Powers had on Germany in 1918 and again in 1945. Not even the United Nations can force Britain to hand over the trillions of dollars demanded. These claims for transatlantic slave trade reparations are reminiscent of the Situationist slogan: be realistic, demand the impossible.

Tottenham has not fared much better since Bernie Grant’s death in the year 2000. The 2011 riots after the shooting by police of Mark Duggan, which spread all over London resulting in five other deaths, have been cited by Thomas Sowell as the inspiration for the 2020 riots across the USA in the name of ‘Black Lives Matter’.

The demand for generalised reparations with no prospect of being paid serves as the engine of a permanent resentment which can be exploited for political means. As Sowell reportedly put it, “Black votes matter to many politicians – more so than black lives. That is why such politicians must try to keep black voters fearful, angry and resentful.”

Blaming democratic town planning for a lack of housing affordability has become commonplace. From former Conservative Party leadership candidate Rory Stewart in his interview with Triggernometry to Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Labour Party’s Rachel Reeves, everyone wants to rip up the town planning rules which are supposedly preventing house-building. Now Angela Rayner, Secretary of State for Housing, is going to do exactly that.

In 1990, the main Act of town planning legislation in England and Wales received its last major update, although it was subsequently modified and added to by a raft of other bills. At the time, housing in the UK was relatively affordable. In 1992 and 1993, more people were leaving the country than arriving, and house prices actually dropped year-on-year from Q4 1989 to Q1 1996, partly due to double-digit interest rates on mortgages limiting capacity to borrow.

In 1997, the UK’s new Labour government made two significant interventions in the housing market, and they had nothing to do with building social housing. If you’re ever in the City of London’s Square Mile with an hour to spare, I highly recommend walking through the Bank of England’s side door, built into a suitably high stone wall, where you will find the entrance to the bank’s museum. Incoming Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, Gordon Brown, immediately wrote a letter to the central bank, making it independent; that document had pride of place in the museum when I visited. Previously, any UK government would expect input into the key economic decision of interest rate setting. Since then, real-terms housing price growth in the UK has meant 2022 prices equalled the peak of 2007 before the international credit crunch.

Secondly, Prime Minister Tony Blair began a marketing campaign designed to attract new people and new investment to the country. ‘Cool Britannia’ was cringe-worthy, but it did signal that the UK was open to new migrants, in particular to the former communist citizens of Eastern Europe. Blair's government also enacted new regulations in 2003 to ensure that Sharia-compliant ‘alternative’ finance involving multiple transactions on the same property would not be disadvantaged for ‘stamp duty’, the property purchase tax on average and more expensive homes.

The UK’s immigration statistics began to grow steadily, from a net increase of 48,000 in 1997 which included Brits returning from overseas, to a net increase of 268,000 in 2004. Net migration averaged at around this level until 2019, until successive Conservative administrations pushed the pedal to the metal, with an estimated 466,000 net migrants in 2021, and net growth of 764,000 arrivals in 2022.

From 1993, stamp duty was 1% of the sale price for a property worth £60,000 or more, as this threshold was considered the value of an average home at the time. In July 1997, Blair’s government introduced banded charges so that buyers of properties worth over £500,000 paid 2% stamp duty instead. These taxes steadily increased so that by 2014, the stamp duty rate was 5% for an average home and 12% on a home worth over £1.5 million.

It was not until 2021 that the stamp duty rates were increased for home buyers who are not UK residents, and today various loopholes remain for residential property buyers who spend some of their time in the UK or have a spouse who does.

In 1993, only the surplus of births over deaths was driving UK population growth, but by 1999 the contribution of net migration was the greater proportion. Compounding the effect, many of the new migrants were having more children per woman on average than existing citizens, meaning that both types of contribution to population growth were up. By 2008 these factors were combining to add over 500,000 new residents a year.

UK birth rates are dropping and the Grim Reaper is gaining, thanks to effects correlated with Covid-19, meeting close to the middle at 681,560 births and 689,629 deaths in 2020. Net migration is not just the dominant factor in UK population growth; it is currently the only significant factor.

Since 1997 the UK has gained over nine million people, comparable to an extra London, but about seventy-three times faster than the capital city, founded in 43 AD, took to reach its current stage of development.

The Labour government of 1997-2010 also embarked upon demolishing 700,000 working-class homes under the banner of its Pathfinder programme. Given that UK home building has rarely exceeded 200,000 units per year since 1990, and dropped to well below 150,000 units from 2010 to 2014, increasing demand and unprecedented low interest rates meant that asking prices for housing climbed predictably.

Housing costs in more desirable areas of the UK grew in a similar fashion after the mid 1990s. Equity-rich buyers looking for more spacious plots outside of the capital could easily outbid locals to secure choice properties, with white flight also a factor as the ethnic diversity of the capital city increased.

Email accounts from America Online or CompuServe, web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and dial-up modems were beginning to make it practical for people with careers in London to work further afield without having to commute every day, further spreading the increase in house prices. The upwards trajectory in these prices slowed from time to time but never really stopped over the following decades, not even after the 2008 financial crash. The UK government chose to bail out banks with public money rather than risk a long-overdue property price correction and all that would imply for voters’ self-perceived wealth. Given the implications for offspring who would need their own housing in the future, that subjective sense of riches was like a citizen of the Weimar Republic pushing a wheelbarrow laden with banknotes in an attempt to secure everyday necessities. Those Germans had a lot of money too, in volume if not in value.

Is it town planning’s fault?

English local authority planning documents are required by central government to assume growth in housing units, for both urban and rural areas. Inner city gentrification since 1997 has bucked the trend of earlier decades, when anyone who could afford to left for the suburbs. The London borough of Lambeth, south of the Houses of Parliament but on the ‘wrong’ side of the River Thames, is an ethnically diverse area and a historic Afro-Caribbean community centred on Brixton. In 2021, Lambeth Council adopted a new local plan which commits it to enable an additional 13,350 new homes by 2029. It has also committed to 3,368 additional serviced visitor accommodation rooms and 160,000 square metres of extra office space by 2041.

Private landowners are unlikely to give up their homes to meet this target, and scarce open space in this inner city borough is protected from development. The only realistic way for the local authority to deliver this many new homes in the country’s fourth most densely populated borough, with over 300,000 people living in a neighbourhood just two and a half miles wide, is to demolish existing low-rise social housing projects in favour of high-rise private apartments. The same model has been used across the capital city, as Architects for Social Housing has documented. What local authorities call ‘estate regeneration’ is mostly privatisation, with for example the remaining phases of the Woodberry Downs scheme across the River Thames in Hackney only 18% social housing for rent after gentrification.

Despite the 2017 tragedy at Grenfell Tower in which seventy-two Londoners died and other fires in social housing projects, UK housing authorities are still specifying high-rise developments not so different from the brutalist tower blocks of the 1960s. New blocks going up cheek-by-jowl in areas such as Vauxhall on the south bank of the Thames resemble Hong Kong rather than the London of picture postcards. The high rise development model not only has implications for human psychology, as J.G. Ballard related; it also cements the relationship between owner and tenant.

The extremely high capital cost of building a tower block means an apartment is very unlikely to be purchased outright by the people that live in it, resulting in some form of leasehold at best, and Airbnb-style renting by the night without tenancy protections at worst. Apart from costs for shared features such as lifts, stairwells and external cladding, the millions of pounds, dollars or yuan needed to construct housing with twenty or more floors means the high rise design actively works against residents securing control of their homes. The model implies placing as many tenants as possible on the smallest possible plot of land, and the idea that a resident may own the property outright one day and stop paying rent or service charges simply does not feature.

What shape should the city take?

On the outskirts of towns and cities, the UK’s ‘ribbon developments’ of the 1920’s and 1930’s added few services, making the new residents socially isolated as well as car-dependent. The architect of Italianate fantasy village Portmeirion, Clough Williams-Ellis opined that sprawling development on a map resembled an octopus, with the housing along main roads forming tentacles emanating from a central brain.

The UK’s post World War II Labour government recognised that the many new homes needed to offset Blitzkrieg damage could not be built on the car-dependent ribbon model. Many of the people in need of new housing were working-class city dwellers who could not afford a car at the time. It was also beginning to be understood that town and city design could not accommodate exponential growth in motor vehicle traffic. The post-war ‘new towns’, built almost from scratch, would be designed to have all the facilities for daily life within walking or cycling distance, as explained to prospective residents in a charming animation of the period.

That began to change in the 1960s as working-class wages were increasing, and a small car was within reach of a skilled factory worker for the first time. The government’s new towns became progressively more car-dependent, incorporating features such as parking spaces for every home. High-rise social housing design for the cities culminated in Erno Goldfinger’s 31 storey Trellick Tower, completed in 1972, a type of dwelling which soon became notorious for its association with social problems.

The UK’s housing project sell-off

Many of Britain's new towns and residential housing projects were built, owned and rented out by local government, giving them the generic title of ‘Council housing’. The Margaret Thatcher government of 1979-1990 privatised this housing stock, gaining popularity with working-class voters who had never been in a position to pay off the cost of building their home and live rent-free before. Many of the Council properties were decades old, and in need of refurbishment. Tenants were given substantial discounts on qualifying purchases, in theory based on the number of years rent they had already paid.

While residents of the high-rises and other concrete structures were dubious about the offer, with good reason, the conventionally-built brick and mortar one, two and three-storey properties were often an attractive deal, depending on the neighbourhood they were located in. In other, less salubrious areas, deck-access Council flats, so-called because of their external landings, some of which were only fifty years old and therefore fairly ‘new’ by British standards, were squatted by punks and other assorted anarchists as they emptied of tenants, and then pulled down.

This social housing sales initiative was the first time that many working-class British people had equity, in the literal rather than the symbolic sense that progressive activists use today. Some former Council tenants took the opportunity to relocate, moving into private sector housing and renting out their former homes, to the disgust of the middle-class Left who have been campaigning to end the ‘Right to Buy’ policy ever since. The Thatcher government and subsequent administrations ensured that local councils could not reinvest the receipts in building new social housing, and the remaining housing projects were transferred to less accountable ‘housing associations’, independent from the democratically-elected councils.

The cycle of boom and bust

Combined with a modest economic recovery after Thatcher’s industrial upheavals of the early 1980s, house price rises in the UK meant that affordability began to decrease by the mid to late years of the decade. Soaring interest rates which reached 15% reduced demand for mortgages, depressing house prices, but not increasing affordability for residents who were highly indebted. These asking price falls temporarily pushed some new homeowners into ‘negative equity’, effectively preventing them from selling up and moving on at the time. The experience of those years in the late 1980s to mid 1990s perhaps led the Labour Party’s Blairites to conclude that politicians should have nothing to do with interest rate setting.

Artificially low Bank of England interest rates after 1997, dropping to below 1% by 2009 and to 0.1% by 2020 harmed the value of savings in cash, and resulted in far larger borrowing for home purchases. Since most home buyers considered the monthly repayments rather than the total sum borrowed, ultra-low interest rates substantially increased buying power on paper, which inflated housing prices strongly, compensating for comparatively weak performance in the real economy.

Many first-time landlords were buying up entry-level houses to let out, directly competing with their own would-be tenants by being more credit-worthy on mortgage applications. They were setting themselves up as middlemen and middlewomen between the bank which really owned the property, and the day-to-day hassle of dealing with a tenant who might or might not pay their rent. Since these buy-to-let landlords were highly leveraged, and could not easily absorb losses from a small property portfolio, they were sold insurance against non-payment of rent and the risk of tenant damage to the dwelling.

The opening up of the buy-to-let market therefore created artificial competition between two groups with insufficient equity to purchase homes outright, enabled by changes to bank and insurance company policy. This combined with the effect of student loan financing on a massive scale, which has seen the growth of housing demand in cities all over the UK to accommodate both domestic and overseas learners during term time, a type of ‘second home’ which is rarely considered as such.

However, the homes that many British people were buying were not significantly different to those their parents and grandparents had lived in, and had already been paid for by rent or mortgages several times over. Since much of Britain's housing stock was already at least a century old, the effect of ultra-low interest rates in a competitive market was manifested as people paying a lot more for the same property, with perhaps the addition of an indoor bathroom. Unlike in China, where rural labourers moving to the cities were swapping a wooden shack for a concrete high-rise with plumbing and electricity, millions of British homeowners were moving into terraced and semi-detached brick properties built by their great-grandfathers’ generation during the Victorian era.

Labour’s housing promises

In a symbol of its disdain for the electorate, the Labour Party pledged last October to ‘build’ 1.5 million new homes in the lifetime of this government, “to save the dream of home ownership”, whereas the Conservative administration it ousted had pledged 300,000 homes per year. You do not need to be a maths genius to figure out that 300,000 new houses a year is exactly the same number as 1.5 million over a five-year parliamentary term. Since the UK’s government no longer builds housing itself, the Labour administration's promises have no bearing on actual delivery, and it has now upped the target to more than 370,000 per year. Like the previous government, it will struggle to meet housing pledges which are far removed from the number of properties the market will construct. And the average new home size has been shrinking, decade after decade since the 1970s.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has changed, he says, in a sly dig at his former boss Jeremy Corbyn. Labour is not socialist enough to simply seize land and build houses for the proletariat. It is capitalist enough to enable new investment in housing, and to maintain the pressure which keeps the market growing. The next generation of British residents will be perpetual tenants, both internal and international migrants in high-rise ‘affordable rent’ city blocks, working directly against the principle that everyone should be able to achieve ‘equity’ and a meaningful stake in society. That vision is not the consequence of town planning, but of anti-planning, pro-growth landlordism, whether state or private. No sane planner would design the housing system we now have in Britain, cramming ever more people into smaller spaces, nor would they wish for a return to the Octopus.

While the political left, typically with no knowledge of planning or house building, will insist that government can solve affordability problems by building property itself, previous housing projects suggest that local councils don’t always make great landlords. Those progressives who think that government housing offers the solution could reflect on the fact that rent subsidy comes out of the pockets of taxpayers, including low-paid workers themselves. Besides, government can be as thirsty for money as any private landlord, and can also neglect the properties it owns.

Government awarding itself permission to build represents a privilege which is easily abused. Social housing schemes recycle tax money so that ordinary citizens subsidise government to become their landlords. In previous eras when working people had very limited access to property finance, that arrangement made more sense, but it is no longer the case. Tenants are systematically disadvantaged by being denied the opportunity to acquire equity, with its long-term financial benefits and personal autonomy that the middle classes take for granted.

Again, the proposed solutions to housing affordability problems rely on a watering down of democratic principles. To build less expensive housing, government needs cheap land. That generally means acquiring land below market price, using compulsory purchase or moving the working classes to post-industrial sites which are neither well-situated nor guaranteed to be free of soil and water contamination.

The reason why China’s tower blocks closely resemble a Glasgow social housing project of the 1960’s is a common system which treats people as economic units needing to be rationalised and modernised, and individual needs or desires as problems to be eliminated. Housing is a political issue, and it won't be solved by taking local democracy out of the equation.

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The alternative to the ‘far-right’ narrative is that some people are angry because of the murders and attempted murders of young girls, and that we don’t know the politics or the attitudes of everyone involved. The progressive media’s analogy with 1930’s Germany requires a specific ethnic group to be the target of rioting. That is also the government narrative, with the Prime Minister having made claims of “far-right thuggery”, but not necessarily an accurate one.

Supposedly, online misinformation about the Southport murders spread by white supremacists led to the riots. The claim that these murders had been carried out by a Muslim was reported by ITV News to have been spread by a website based in Pakistan, which doesn’t fit the narrative of the far-right organising the riots. ITV correspondent Rohit Kachroo knocked on the door of website operator Farhan Asif, who has now come to the attention of police in Lahore. This misinformation was clickbait, and the motives for spreading the rumour were purely financial.

The claim that the summer riots were anti-immigrant is not supported by the complete lack of disorder regarding the many new arrivals from Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. 1.4 million people arrived in the UK in one decade from the eight former Eastern Bloc countries that joined the EU in 2004. That the protests were simply racist does not fit with the lack of complaint about Hong Kongers, Sikhs or Buddhists, or ordinary Muslims for that matter.

As for would-be ‘fascists’, it is politically inept to use that word to describe reactionary protestors. The protests and rioting which take place around the world on a regular basis don’t need to have anything to do with a particular ideology. In Kolkata, India, doctors angry that a female colleague was raped and murdered recently staged noisy protests and strikes. Presumably, they are not ‘far-right’ or ‘fascist’ for pointing out that gender-based violence is real and unacceptable.

Using Occam’s Razor, the more likely explanation is that the UK’s 2024 summer riots were about what the participants said they were about: the murder and injury of young girls. No doubt, some rioters decided to take out their anger on innocent people, as mob justice is no justice at all. The British state’s failures to protect women and children from the abuse of grooming gangs, media personalities and even serving police officers has also made it a target for public anger.

What is ‘vicarious retribution’?

In the definition used by Brian Lickel et al “Vicarious retribution occurs when a member of a group commits an act of aggression toward the members of an outgroup for an assault or provocation that had no personal consequences for him or her but which did harm a fellow ingroup member.” Sometimes the outgroup is those who wish to harm children for whatever reason, and the ingroup is the rest of humanity.

Mob justice requires that the UK’s white sex offenders are kept in separate prisons to protect their lives from other prisoners. In one example of why this has proved necessary, Richard Huckle, a white man convicted of abusing up to 200 children in the Islamic state of Malaysia, was murdered by another prisoner while in jail in the UK. If prisoners vehemently opposed to child abuse were racist or ‘Islamophobic’, and therefore viewed Malaysian children as being of lesser worth, Huckle might not have been targetted for ‘vicarious retribution’.

Britain’s progressives are committed to globalisation. Even questioning the claim that men from explicitly patriarchal cultures are no more sexist or dangerous to women and girls than the average British male is completely unacceptable to them. This is clear from the document ‘Online Allegations Of Gender-Based Violence’ published by government-funded ‘antifa’ NGO, ‘HOPE not Hate’. Page 4 of this document states that “…the far right are exploiting gender-based violence to serve their own anti-migrant, racist and Islamophobic narratives.” Page 9 states “Remember that the focus here is on the weaponisation of the allegations, not the allegations themselves.”

Under the principle of vicarious retribution, rioters were not angry with migrants in general; they were angry because of what happened in Southport and in previous examples of Islamist violence, in particular gendered violence. The murders and attempted murders in Southport resembled the modus operandi of previous jihadist attacks in the UK, as did the targets of girls, music and dancing. Some people were quick to make the association without waiting for further evidence. It is now alleged that the suspect for the Southport attack was in possession of a jihadist training manual and a chemical weapon substance, allegations which were not disclosed by police at the time of the riots. However, not all similar attacks are known to be linked to the jihadist cause. It has not been reported that Ioan Pintaru, a Romanian homeless man who is white and is alleged to have repeatedly stabbed a child in one of London’s most popular tourist locations, is or could be Muslim. The girl who was stabbed, who fortunately survived the attack, was hoping to see Taylor Swift in concert.

How many buildings were burned down?

The official narrative implies that mosques and hotels containing Muslim migrants have been burned down by angry ‘fascists’ radicalised online. On the basis of media reports, it seems this did not happen. One example is from County Down, Northern Ireland. If you only read the Mirror newspaper's headline, you would assume that the local mosque had been set on fire. According to the article itself, the solitary petrol bomb thrown on that occasion failed to ignite, which by Irish standards of organised political violence is not a riot.

The 2024 rioters convicted so far seem to have been in conflict with police who supposedly contained public protests against the Southport murders, rather than being jailed for fighting immigrants or British Muslims. To the best of my knowledge there have been no mosques or migrant hotels burned down during these riots, and no reports of injuries to anyone inside or leaving these buildings.

A Citizens Advice office in Sunderland was set on fire, right next to a police station which was also vandalised. CNN, which claimed that two Holiday Inns containing migrants had been set “ablaze”, published a photo of a plastic bin on fire outside a hotel in Rotherham, one of the key towns in the British grooming gangs phenomenon. The hotel itself did not catch fire, according to reports. The Holiday Inn Express in Tamworth, rented in its entirety by the UK government to house asylum seekers, suffered limited fire damage in the area of a side window, one of several windows which was broken. A convicted rioter from Tamworth was sentenced in October 2024 to six years and 17 weeks in prison due to his part in the attack on police and the hotel building.

Accounts of the 2024 riots include claims that bricks were thrown ‘towards’ mosques, and that vehicles were smashed or burned outside, but there have been few reports of damage to a mosque, except to a wall outside and a photo of a broken window at Southport Islamic Centre Mosque. According to one police report, fifty-three officers were injured during the 2024 riots, of which forty-nine were from Merseyside and four from Lancashire. Eight of these officers were reported as seriously injured with fractures, lacerations, a suspected broken nose and concussion. Three police dogs were injured by bricks thrown at them. These reports suggest the bricks in the Southport mosque boundary wall were used as ammunition by the rioters to attack the police, rather than people at the mosque. The media has had nothing to say about injuries to protesters against the Southport murders, although police batons and dogs were used on them.

If there were any arrests or convictions relating to assaults or injuries other than on police officers, please set the record straight by commenting below with details.

Demagogues and elites

Writing for The Guardian’s ‘Observer’, Josh Cohen repeated the claim that “The recent riots after the stabbings at a children’s dance class in Southport were largely triggered by online demagogues and provocateurs who spread the false rumour...” In this analysis, it cannot be possible that the riots were a reaction to the murders and attempted murders themselves, which would have made the murderer the provocateur ultimately responsible for ‘triggering’ the riots.

Cohen’s article asserts that we must not look back in anger at atrocities, and all need to calm down. This piece starts with trivial examples of anger in everyday life, such as negative restaurant reviews, and then switches to discuss the recent murders and riots. The sinister effect is to place this serious public unrest as on a continuum with unimportant matters.

The government and media’s use of ‘phobia’ after a terrorist incident is a manipulation technique, because it attempts to persuade the anxious and afraid that they are irrational. Telling people who are shocked by the multiple murder of girls that they have no legitimate concerns is gaslighting on an organised scale. It seems traditional chivalric values combined with the modern recognition of gendered violence and sexual abuse have provoked a dangerous reaction in the 2024 riots.

The word ‘demagogues’ used in Cohen’s article has a dual meaning; like ‘democracy’, it stems from ‘demos’ and did not always have a negative connotation. Wikipedia, now in the multi-millionaire club of progressive journalism thanks to Google’s money, defines demagogue as “a political leader who gains popularity by arousing the common people against elites, often through oratory and emotion.” The Guardian is the most elite of all ‘progressive’ newspapers, thanks to its billionaire backing by the Scott Trust, and its greatest fear is apparently the white working class. Sir Roger Scruton called the fear of one’s own populous ‘oikophobia’.

National anarchism

No doubt, the experience of being inside a building with an angry mob outside can be terrifying. Especially since the ‘mostly peaceful’ riots of 2020, that is now a regular occurrence in the West, whether you happen to be an academic feminist who doesn’t think men can become women, or a Jewish humanitarian with doubts about the intifada. Perhaps the progressive anarchists in the ‘black bloc’ assumed that no-other group would adopt these mob tactics, least of all their cousins among the national anarchists: the anti-globalisation wing of the anti-authoritarian movement.

The 1993 Welling riot in south-east London was the culmination of street protests, six months after the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence and three other racist killings beforehand. That protest in Welling turned into a riot because police fought for hours to prevent the anti-Nazi contingent reaching the British National Party headquarters. The BNP operated in the open, and had no need of face masks.

Anarchists wear masks because they expect hostile surveillance. The photo of the 2024 riot in Rotherham that the Guardian used for Josh Cohen’s article shows a participant holding a red flare, disguised by a mask and hoodie. The England flag shown prominently in CNN's photo of one of 2024’s white riots is decorated with anarchy symbols, not ‘far-right’ iconography. The person holding this flag wore the Guy Fawkes mask designed for the ‘V for Vendetta’ graphic novel, a fixture of the anarchist uniform.

With these mask-wearers and their anarchy symbols painted on Saint George’s flag, the photographic evidence points to national anarchist rather than ‘far-right’ organising. Graffiti on the wall of one damaged migrant hotel included the slogan “F**k Feds”, youth slang referencing the Federales, an expression which could just have easily been spray-painted by ‘antifa’ anarchists.

No ‘leader’ of the 2024 riots has been arrested; there was no Oswald Mosley figure present. Mosley addressed his supporters at several rallies before the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in 1936. Court reports suggesting police and their vehicles were a target in the riots of 2024 again point to the principal actors being anarchists rather than national socialists or fascists. Both of the latter groups support state power and wish to become the police force of an authoritarian government, not fight the police.

Photographic evidence, court reports and the media’s failure to find a credible link to far-right groups suggests the 2024 riots were in part apolitical reactionary, and in part self-organised by national anarchists, perhaps imagining themselves at war with the ‘globalist’ hegemony of the World Economic Forum, George Soros and Bill Gates. They could be a throwback to the 18th and 19th century anarchists who aligned themselves with national liberation movements.

The UK Police’s National Counter Terrorism Security Office groups anarchists with ‘left wing’ security threats and declares the risk of an attack to be low. By contrast, this organisation lists ‘cultural nationalism’, including the idea that western culture is at risk from a lack of integration, under ‘Extreme Right-Wing Terrorism’. Perhaps these are the sources that the media uses when classifying rioters, and the information offered on anarchist threats is incomplete and out of date.

A disproportionate reaction

While the recent riots were obviously unacceptable for anyone who supports the rule of law, and very intimidating for people in the areas where these events took place, it was hyperbolic for the Prime Minister to talk of “Nazi salutes in the street”. During the riots of Kristallnacht, more than 1000 synagogues and prayer rooms were burned or damaged; Ernst vom Rath had been killed by Herschel Grynszpan, and national socialists took revenge by killing 91 Jews. Even the UK’s riots of 2011 following the police shooting of Mark Duggan, in which five other people are known to have died, featured far more arson and looting than the supposed ‘far-right’ insurrection of 2024.

In 2017, less than a month after the jihadist Manchester Arena bombing which killed 22 people and injured hundreds more, a white man, allegedly radicalised online, used a van as a weapon to attack the mosque in Finsbury Park, London, killing one Muslim and injuring nine others.

Since that tragedy in Finsbury Park, I know of no-one killed in retaliation for any of the knife and suicide bomb attacks perpetrated in Britain, including attacks which specifically targeted girls, dancing, pop music and gay men. The progressive paradox of open border policy is that it means allowing people in to your country who don’t share your intersectional analysis, including people who want to kill people like you.

Attacks on Muslims in the UK are not exclusively perpetrated by white supremacists, with several examples of sectarian and so-called ‘honour’ killings recorded by the courts. One of the most terrible attacks in recent years was carried out by Mohammed Abbkr, who set worshippers on fire at two separate mosques in England. When motivation is politically inexplicable, a mental health judgement is usually offered; but anyone who wishes to carry out mass murder, by any means, is not well.

It appears essential for the progress of globalisation to reassure people that acts of violence are inevitable, and that punishment after the fact is all government can do. The media is complicit, instilling fear of the white working class in the bourgeoisie and migrant communities, even those settled black communities which were not the target of the most recent riots in Britain.

In fact, the greatest threat to black lives in Britain is ordinary street violence, not the organised ‘far-right’ or national anarchists. Two people died following eight reported stabbings at this year's Notting Hill Carnival in London, including Cher Maximen, a young woman who had reportedly tried to stop a fight.

No explanations were made by the intelligentsia for this violence at Carnival. There was no emergency government announcement, and no special courts convened to process the hundreds of people arrested. The Prime Minister, while asserting that he is even-handed in the punishment of rioting, has not ascribed a political motive to the latest murders in Notting Hill, nor has he called young black Londoners who are assumed to vote Labour ‘far-left thugs’.

While the white working class is considered so stupid and easily manipulated that they will riot when instructed to by a tweet or Facebook post, the progressive bigotry of low expectations sees violence in our communities as inevitable and insoluble. It is past time that violence itself was identified as the problem to be dealt with, rather than focusing on the reaction.

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