Peter McCormack was murdered by a UVF murder gang at the Thierafurth Inn in Kilcoo on 19 November 1992. He was 42. Three others were injured. A loyalist death squad walked into a packed pub during a charity darts match and opened fire. There is no justification for it. None. The men who did this were sectarian psychos. Their crime is theirs alone.

The UVF claimed at the time that they had been targeting a named republican who was not present in the bar. That claim does not alter the nature of what they did. They still opened fire on a room full of people.

For thirty-four years, the public and academic record described Peter McCormack as a civilian. The CAIN Sutton Index of Deaths lists him as a civilian killed by the Ulster Volunteer Force on 19 November 1992 at the Thierafurth Inn, Kilcoo, County Down, shot during a gun attack on the pub. Police repeatedly called him “an innocent victim of a sickening sectarian attack.” The 2016 Police Ombudsman report, the 2022 High Court judgment of Mr Justice Humphreys, and the subsequent damages rulings all proceeded on that basis.

In July 2026, eight survivors of the attack secured a civil settlement with the PSNI and the Ministry of Defence. The Irish News reported the figure as £4.6 million, one of the largest single-group Troubles collusion-related payouts on the public record. Other outlets described it as “several million pounds.” The precise total remains confidential under the settlement terms. The money was paid to eight living survivors. Peter McCormack’s individual case was not included.

The same UVF unit has been linked to the Loughinisland massacre, in which six men were killed. No publicly reported group settlement of comparable size has emerged for the core victims of that attack.

Weeks after the July 2026 settlement, republican commemorative material in South Down presented McCormack as Óglach Peter McCormack, Volunteer of Óglaigh na hÉireann.

That sequence is a matter of public record.

South Down Sinn Féin MP Chris Hazzard described the 2022 High Court ruling as “a watershed decision for families living in South Down” that “further exposes damning levels of collusion.” In 2023 he called for an interstate case so that “the survivors of the Thierafurth attack” could secure a proper investigation. At the time of the 2026 settlement he called the attack “a nakedly sectarian attack that affected many people in this village.” Mary Lou McDonald and others welcomed the outcome in similar terms.

No elected republican representative publicly claimed McCormack as an IRA Volunteer before August 2026. Throughout the years of litigation and political campaigning, they left the civilian description unchallenged and uncontradicted. The legal process and the large settlement proceeded on that footing. Only after the money had been paid did the Volunteer designation appear.

It is of course possible that organisations sometimes formalise membership recognition years later for internal reasons, or that Republicans simple forgot that he was an IRA Volunteer and only remembered in August of this year, in which case an apology is surely due to his family who, if they are and they may not be Republicans, will have been denied the true story for decades by other Republicans.

To believers, his status as an IRA volunteer would be something to be proud of and to commemorate and celebrate; for some reason, they have been denied this and lied to for decades. Why?

Both points can be acknowledged. Yet the public record stood unchallenged for more than three decades, a major settlement was reached under that record, and only then was the claim of Volunteer status put in the open.

The questions remain.

Why was the designation withheld while courts ruled and while the settlement was negotiated?
Did the High Court have the full picture, as republican sources now present it?
Were the elected representatives who spoke repeatedly about the case aware of the status now being claimed?
If they were, why didn't they say so while the process was underway?

If a man listed for decades as a civilian can be formally claimed as a Volunteer only after a major settlement has been paid to the living survivors, then the completeness of the public record in other cases cannot be assumed.

How many others currently listed as civilians might later be claimed once the legal and political process around their deaths has concluded? The public cannot know the full internal picture. What it can see is the sequence in this one.

The UVF murder remains the work of a sectarian murder gang. The findings of plausible collusion and investigative failure remain serious. But legacy processes depend on the information placed before courts and the public.

The dates, the statements, the size of the payment, and the timing of the unveiling are all public. They raise questions that will not disappear because they are inconvenient.

The past cannot be opened selectively.

Peter McCormic (42), a teacher, was murdered by the UVF at the Thierafurth Inn in Kilcoo on the 19th of November in 1992 during a charity darts match; three others were also injured. This has always been a clear-cut case of sectarian murder by a loyalist death cult.

A Catholic Civilian murdered for the’ crime’ of being Catholic, horrific, sickening and evil. In 2016, the Police Ombudsman’s report linked the same UVF murder gang to the unit involved in the massacre at Loughisland.

The High Court would later go on to identify plausible evidence of significant state collusion,” and investigated failures, the use of military intelligence by the murder gang and links to a member of the UDR.

Survivors from the attack were awarded a substantial settlement this year, reported to have been over £4 million; Mr McCormack’s individual case wasn’t part of the group settlement. So far so good. And then last week at a republican commemoration in Co Down, Mr McCormack was unveiled as Óglaigh McCormack, an IRA volunteer, with all the trappings and honours that status brings within the Republican community.

So, was he always an IRA volunteer? If so, why the pretence for decades, until after a substantial settlement was made? This doesn’t change that Mr McCormac was killed by a gang of sectarian psychos, but it surely changes the mood music when we look back at the events leading to his murder, and the High Court should have been aware of the full truth when making its judgement.

The question now is how many other “civilians” were really IRA men? How many graves are missing Óglaigh, and how many legacy inquests might look very different if the full truth of everyone involved's stories was known?

Sophus E Magill is a Green Party parish councillor on the Isle of Wight. On 24 July 2026, in a private WhatsApp group called Greens Against Imperialism, he wrote:

“Zionism has to go, it’s ultimately an apartheid, ethnosupremacist ideology.”

When asked what that meant, he replied: “That needs to go. The only solution is one equal state.”

The next question was direct: “You want Israel wiped off the map, in essence?”

Magill answered: “Yes, I would like that.”

He continued: “I don’t think it’s violent to want an illegitimate apartheid state gone from all maps. Like Rhodesia.”

Only afterwards came the conventional rider about Israeli citizens who are not war criminals.

This is not a drunk teenager on an anonymous forum. This is an elected Green Party representative. Other party members use the group he created. The same networks are currently running a highly organised internal campaign to force a motion titled “Zionism is Racism” to the top of the Green Party’s Autumn Conference agenda.

Members are being instructed, through professional graphics and videos, to rank every single motion so the preferred text receives the maximum points. An independent security briefing notes that a determined group has joined the party specifically to push the motion through. It already has more than eight hundred co-signers.

The private language and the public machinery belong to the same people.

Rosie Latchford was elected in May as a Green councillor for Harringay in Haringey, a borough the Greens now run as a minority administration. Her candidate statement records that she spent the previous two years campaigning for Fossil Free London, organising “for climate and social justice… and for a free Palestine.” Tyrone Scott, elected the same month in Hackney, previously chaired Greens of Colour. Direct-action climate networks and anti-Zionist organising networks are not separate tribes. They are overlapping circles of the same activist class.

This is the concrete case. The larger pattern is older and more dangerous.

A particular mindset tends toward leftist causes. It cannot think independently and needs to be part of a herd. It is naturally attracted to a Manichean outlook in which everything is divided between pure good and pure evil, and it is highly susceptible to ideology. Such people are drawn to slogans like “hope not hate” — classic Newspeak. The thinking is done for them.

The slogans invert reality so the chanters can keep believing they are the good ones. This inversion tricks ordinary people into thinking the left must be good too, especially when institutions such as the BBC reinforce it. They are not good people. They are an irrational, combustible group convinced that their moral superiority places them above the law.

The Greens are massive hypocrites. No one may criticise their ideals or their favoured groups, because that is hate speech. Yet when a right-wing politician is attacked or murdered, the response is often soft justification: it would not have happened if the victim had not been so hateful.

Their hate is treated as righteous. Everyone else is ordered to “be kind.” They keep the most inflammatory rhetoric in circulation partly to maintain certain alliances. As Western leftists eventually discover with Iran, once they are no longer useful, the consequences show them what real hate looks like.

Progressivism — the “Be Nice” people — are very pleasant while they are getting their own way. The moment they are thwarted, all hell breaks loose. Idealists want an Ideal World, ideologically pure and completely dismissive of the idea that the best is the enemy of the good. Any apparent concession is only a short-term tactic on the road to the Perfect Society. There are no real concessions. They will impose their ideas.

“Just Stop Oil” — and oil is stopped in the North Sea.
“Your house is burning” — and we get Net Zero.
“Imagine there’s no countries” — and borders erode.
“Heal, don’t lock away” — and early release follows.

The fringe ideas become policy against the clearly expressed preferences of the majority because the people pushing them believe they are the true judges of right and wrong. Anyone who disagrees is fair game. It is the classic tribal mentality: they group, feed off each other’s hatred, and then act.

This psychology is not new. In 1876, Mark Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The boys form a secret gang, swear blood oaths, give themselves pirate names, and declare war on the grown-up world. The real thrill is not the treasure. It is the togetherness, the secret society, the feeling that they are bigger than their boring little lives. Seventy-five years later,r Eric Hoffer described the same machinery in its adult form.

Mass movements attract those frustrated with mundane existence, who hate the present, and who surrender the individual self to a holy cause. The passion is not self-advancement but self-renunciation. Unrelieved boredom is one of the most reliable signs that a society is ripe for it. The true believer is often not the starving peasant but the person who has tasted possibility and still wants more.

The middle-class activists who dominate today’s direct-action scene are Tom Sawyer’s gang grown up. Their pirate island is a blocked stretch of the M25 or a disrupted dinner. Their treasure is moral superiority. Their enemies are their own society and the Jewish state. Twain showed how charming the impulse is when you are twelve and eventually go home for supper. Hoffer showed what happens when it is never outgrown. Some of us never come home for supper — and the sledgehammers are real.

The social composition makes the pattern clearer still. The progressive left corners the market in double-barrelled names. A striking proportion of its activists and adherents are lawyers, media people, NGO staff, senior managers, or the children of those professions.

This is not the voice of the dispossessed. It is the voice of a culturally privileged, status-anxious section of the upper-middle class that has learned to convert personal dissatisfaction into political virtue.

The ideology does not rise from the factory floor. It rises from the universities, the HR departments, the subsidised arts, and the dinner tables where certain opinions are forbidden. If there were a Battle of Cable Street today, a large section of these groups would stand with Mosley.

Not because they have become 1930s fascists, but because their politics treats any pure enough cause as exempt from ordinary democratic restraint. The same people who claim to fight fascism would, under the pressure of their own moral logic, find themselves on the wrong side of the street.

The claim of a serious “far-right” threat has always been largely a myth. The National Front and the English Defence League were predominantly working-class and often Labour-voting. They were labelled right-wing because the left required a story in which nationalism itself was the original sin.

That story was self-serving claptrap, but it spared Marxist blushes after the full scale of communist and fascist horrors became undeniable. The deceit stuck. It remains the protective myth under which today’s coalitions of neo-Marxists, anti-capitalists, Greens and Islamists operate. Remaining on the back foot while they form a united front against economic and political liberty is no longer affordable.

The electoral arithmetic makes it harder. Roughly one third of voters sit on the left or far left, one third on the right, and one third in the middle pay little close attention and mainly consume mainstream broadcast news. That inattentive third is steadily pushed left by institutional bias, allowing ideas with shallow popular roots to become entrenched policy.

It is difficult to see how this polarisation can be resolved inside current national arrangements. The darker thought sometimes occurs: a partition of the Indian kind. Those who want ordered liberty move one way; the progressives stay another. Within a decade the progressives would be building a wall to stop their brightest leaving. Plus ça change.

Revolutionary movements do not stop where the original idealists prefer. The Fabians and respectable Greens encourage more radical cadres. Those cadres eventually turn on them as insufficiently pure and sweep them away. The United Kingdom currently keeps the milder progressives safe. Once it no longer does, they will discover what powerlessness feels like.

Most politically coded hatred in Britain today comes from the left. The cult of nice is only nice while it is winning. The rest of the time it is a politics of erasure — of countries, of borders, of dissenting opinion, and of the ordinary rules that make democratic life possible.

If Greens4Palestine and the other groups pushing Zionism is racism lose. They will not be kind. They will turn on the Zack Polanskies of the Green Party and his fascist running dogs, bourgeois, deviationist, counter-revolutionary capitalist lickspittles and Zionist 5th columnists with the sheer fiery fury that only the be kind brigade can produce when they are betrayed.

Personally, part of me can’t wait; it should be hilarious. The people's popular front of No Zionists will hopelessly implode in classic splits and vicious infighting, purge and counter-purge until the righteous few will walk out to carry on the fight in a new pure righteous party, the Green Brotherhood, perhaps?

Of course the lunatics and racists and Jew haters may win, and it will be a handful of old Greens huddled around a compost box, passing the reffer around and swearing revenge on their former colleagues who have exiled them to Hackney Fields.

Sophus E Magill is a Green Party parish councillor on the Isle of Wight. On 24 July 2026, in a private WhatsApp group called Greens Against Imperialism, he wrote:

“Zionism has to go, it’s ultimately an apartheid, ethnosupremacist ideology.”

When asked what that meant, he replied: “That needs to go. The only solution is one equal state.”

The next question was direct: “You want to Israel wiped off the map, in essence?”

Magill answered: “Yes, I would like that.”

https://roryhanrahan.co.uk/cult-of-nice.html

A brave man, a patriot, a true son of Ireland, his good character endlessly besmirched and blackened by those lickspittles, catpaws of Zionist, capitalist America for his courageous anti-imperialism.

But hark, let England and her Irish quislings quake for now; at last those stalwarts of democracy, those tireless champions of the innocent and the maligned, the Fianna of old reborn FinucaneToner.

Solicitors, warriors, heroes, through the mists they stride; and no quarter will they give to Free Staters or their lackeys.

Their bravery does not surprise those of us who properly understand intersectionality and the one true cause. Only the feeble-minded, warped by the relentless propaganda of state media, still cling to the childish vulgar notion of “good” and “bad.” There is, of course, no such thing. There is only our side, the true, the just, the historically necessary and everyone else.

After all, we hate poverty, war, and injustice… unlike you securocrat, white settler imperialist capitalists.

This moral clarity is especially impressive when set against the Finucane family’s long and unyielding campaign on the legacy issue. The RUC, the UDR and the British Army those jackbooted fascist oppressors, those class traitors, the armed sword of imperialism and capitalism.

Who must be held to standards of purity and operational perfection; that, well, no force in the history of conflict has ever come close and could never meet, but after all they are on the wrong side of history. And silly out-of-date old-fashioned ideas like “truth” or “justice” no longer apply.

There is truth, and then there is our truth, and our truth is the universal language of the oppressed and of love.

The IRA and its brave successors, by contrast, must be judged through the advanced lens of oppressed and oppressor.

Those not sufficiently educated or enlightened may struggle to understand why, for example, burning twelve collie-dog fanciers to death with improvised napalm at a dinner dance in a small rural hotel was in reality a brave and brilliant strike against capitalism and imperialism.

One can only pity such people; propaganda has destroyed their class and racial consciousness. Consistency is, after all, a white settler imperialist construct. The oppressed must be free to resist by all and any means.

An unfair commentator might observe that Mr Kinahan is rather well placed to pay serious money for representation. But that is not the fault of FinucaneToner.

They are forced to exist within the capitalist system. Come the glorious revolution, they will, of course, hand every last bob over to charity.

Anyone who suggests otherwise is a class traitor, a willing tool of white settler-colonial capitalist imperialism or worse, they keep their toaster in the cupboard....

I’ve been reading Rod Liddle all my adult life. He, along with Kevin Myers’ Irishman’s Diary, Ruth Dudley Edwards and Eoghan Harris, were my introduction to great writing. And the joy of the polemic.

He was funny, wise, acerbic and clever. But most of all he understood the human condition. Even knowing us, he remained deeply fond of us for all our many and often amusing faults. That fondness was the secret of his power.

He had the rarest ability of the truly great writers. He turned complex abstract ideas into simple stories, not by dumbing them down but by making the human element central. The greatest writers are storytellers. It is the human element that holds our attention. Through story you can explain almost everything.

Rod knew how to tell a story. That was his genius. Whether railing against the madness of bureaucracy or the stupidity of newthink and the new language of officialdom, he brought you along on the tide of the story and kept you laughing even when he was being deadly serious.

His politics were relatively simple. For most of us he represented the old social democratic instinct. He found his natural home in the SDP, a lifelong member, supporter and electoral candidate. The party suited him perfectly. It was for people far too bloody-minded for the modern Conservative Party and too realistic for the new left.

He was working-class solid and solidly northern, but it was never a costume or a prop, and there was no chip on his shoulder. He had succeeded because he worked bloody hard and was talented and clever. He was living proof that brains, graft and toughness can take you anywhere. No doors are closed to the clever and hard-working, and if they were, kick them the fuck down.

He believed in the North and the working class across Britain. He never lost touch with the culture he grew up in and never sneered at the drinking, the smoking or the football the way so many of his middle-class colleagues did.

I always found time to read any column or article he wrote. First because it would always cheer me up. Second because it was the work of a proper craftsman. As a writer, I owe him a lot. He showed me you could write about the ordinary things in life without turning into the golf-club bore. He wrote as if you were standing at the bar with him having a pint or having a crafty cigarette out the side door at work.

Last week I was invited to the SDP garden party. It was raucous fun, full of life, good-natured arguments and brilliant young independently minded people. I will be honest. I had secretly hoped Rod Liddle would be there. I was looking forward to meeting my hero. Sadly, he wasn’t there, as we now know he was very ill.

That is why his best columns landed with such force. These were not the arguments of think tanks. They were reports from the front lines. You felt it when he wrote about the underclass, the collapse of basic order in towns and regions, or the strange new rules of speech that have strangled life.

He had a genius for noticing the moment when official language parted company with reality. A government statement, a police press release, a university policy document. He would hold it to the light and show the absurd gap between words and the world.

The humour was never decorative. It held the whole thing together and made the point impossible to ignore. His columns on immigration and integration were the most honest written by anyone in the mainstream press. He loathed both the sentimental version and the purely punitive one.

He described what he saw in plain words we could all understand. While writing this, I reread One Night at the Baftas, and I laughed so hard my wife thought I was having some sort of breakdown. His description of reacting to an on-stage apology by loudly shouting preposterous insults like “you self-important, preening, hideous, unnatural, waxen-skinned spaffgoblin” and “arse badger” across the auditorium had tears running down my face.

He understood the loss felt by people who had seen their world turned upside down in less than a generation. Industry gone, the pub, the working men’s club and Saturday football hectored and closed down by their betters. He was not loyal to any tribe. He was loyal to what he saw.

He ended up with two homes that still allowed that kind of writing. The Spectator and the Sunday Times. Both gave him the space the rest of the British press had decided was too dangerous. In return he gave them a columnist genuinely popular with readers rather than merely approved of by the right people.

At the Spectator he belonged to the older tradition. Literate, sceptical, willing to be disliked. The shorter form suited his gift for the sudden deflating observation. He trusted the reader’s intelligence. The jokes landed harder for it.

The Sunday Times is a bigger beast. He did not soften. Week after week he wrote about the country as it was rather than as the professional classes wished it to be. The results were endless complaints and periodic attempts to rein him in. They published him anyway.

The cost was real. He was described in terms that would have ended most careers. Campaigns were organised against him. Invitations dried up. He was vilified by all the worst people. He lived the maxim that you can tell the worth of a man by his enemies. He observed the pressure without self-pity. Many writers in his position eventually chose safer options. Liddle kept writing about crime, the underclass, the failures of official language and integration. He stuck to the columnist’s job. See the world as it is and describe it in plain English.

His absence will be felt in many ways. The immediate one is personal. There will be far fewer early mornings sat in my garden laughing my arse off as Rod skewered the latest madness of the day. I will miss that badly.

Honesty, humour and curiosity were the source of his authority. Without them, political writing floats into abstraction or sinks into performance. He kept it tethered.

That tradition he belonged to, plain-speaking, empirically minded, working-class and undiplomatic, once had a secure place in the British press. It is slowly dying out. His death has hastened it. The best tribute is not to sentimentalise him. It is to remember what he did and how few are left willing to be as brave and honest.

Dear all,

You will no doubt have heard of Drag Time Story Hour, where colourful drag artists visit schools and Libraries to tell stories to young and older children, sometimes reading from children’s classics or telling stories of their lives;

I would like to harness some of that energy and design to bring Armed Forces Veterans instead of drag artists to visit schools, youth centres, and libraries.

Veterans of the Armed Forces, men and women who have borne the weight of service, to visit classrooms and recount lived stories of bravery, honour and quiet pride. Life is hard. It is meant to be so. The difficulty is not an aberration but the very condition that confers worth upon achievement. Success lightly won is success lightly valued; that which is wrested from adversity carries a deeper savour. Failure, too, will come—sometimes repeatedly. This is neither tragedy nor indictment.

The only true failure is the abandonment of the struggle itself. To persist, to rise again, to refuse the counsel of despair: these are the lessons that endure, and they are best learned not from theory but from those who have practised them under fire or in the long, unglamorous grind of duty. The narratives we propose are those of patriotism and civic pride—stories drawn from every background, every race, yet all of them British and all of them unashamed of that identity.

In a country growing ever more multiracial, the shared language of belonging becomes more, not less, essential. Without it, the mosaic risks becoming a mere heap of fragments. Civic pride and patriotism are not relics of a vanished age; they are the mortar that still binds.

We require fresh channels through which these living testimonies may reach the young—channels that speak with the authority of experience rather than the rhetoric of ideology. It is with that conviction that I invite you to the inaugural pilot of this modest venture, to be held at the public house I keep in Oxfordshire.

There, over a decent cup of tea and a bacon roll in unpretentious surroundings,

we shall begin.

We keep hearing comparisons to Clement Attlee, that he is channelling Attlee, that this is the Attlee government, a government of change and a government of big movement. The comparison is worth taking seriously, perhaps not for the usual reasons.

Attlee was not a great communicator. He was wooden, monosyllabic, almost allergic to charisma, far too quiet and often looked like he would rather be somewhere else. But what he did have was a ruthlessness, a vision and a clear idea of what he wanted to build. Burnham has the chance to match that ruthlessness while being a far better communicator and far more charismatic. The question is whether he can use the levers that are now in his hands.

He has opportunities. The first is the Treasury. It has grown far too big for its boots. Somewhere over the last few decades it decided its job was to tell the Prime Minister what he or she could or could not do, rather than finding the money to do what the public had voted for. This must stop now. Burnham should make it plain from the start that the Treasury’s role is to carry out his priorities and find ways to pay for them. If they cannot or will not, then he must find the people who will. It is not about smashing the civil service. It is more about reminding them who actually won the elections. Attlee did not let the mandarins rewrite his programme. Burnham must not either.

Second is welfare and work, especially for the young. PIP and the whole mental health benefits system have ballooned in ways that nobody serious could possibly defend anymore. Far too many young adults are on benefits when they could, should and need to be in work, either for the first time or after a spell out of it. Burnham claims to know the ground from Greater Manchester. Well, he can use that. Lessons learned from there and the problems he has seen firsthand.

A real reform would separate long-term disability from the surge in claims that have happened since the pandemic. The goal must be straightforward: get as many young people as possible into proper jobs, not endless schemes that go nowhere. Actual work.

Here is his opportunity to make the greatest difference for the next generation of young people by giving them the gifts of purpose and opportunity, rather than throwing millions of young people on the scrap heap and leaving them to wallow in the misery of low expectations and no opportunities. He can give youth the greatest gift of all; opportunity, choice and purpose.

Thirdly, there is defence. Britain needs to be a force for good again. And the key word here is force. For too long we have pretended that soft power and diplomacy are enough on their own. They are not. He can make it clear that this country will project real military strength when its interests or values are threatened.

This means proper funding, proper equipment and, most importantly, a willingness to act. Attlee at least sent troops to Korea and Malaya while still building the welfare state. The two things do not have to be in conflict. Burnham has the opportunity to show the same clarity.

A Prime Minister who is prepared to use force when necessary is taken far more seriously abroad and at home. We need that clarity back.

Finally, housing. The line “build, baby, build” has a ring to it for a reason, and Andy should heed it. We need homes built at scale. We need ordinary people to own a stake. That does not just mean more social housing. It means making it easier for working families to get on the property ladder and stay on it.

We need planning reform that works, not the usual half-arsed measures. Burnham has talked a good game about this before. Now he has the opportunity and the power to deliver. Attlee’s government built hundreds of thousands of homes after the war. Burnham could do something similar for ownership rather than just renting from the state or from big landlords.

The Attlee parallel will keep coming up as long as Burnham keeps referring to himself as a reforming Prime Minister. This is fine. We need one badly. But Attlee’s real strength was never his speeches. It was that he knew what he wanted and he was prepared to push through ruthlessly, including and especially against opposition from his own party and the civil service.

He was never loved for his personality. He was remembered because he delivered. Burnham is a far better communicator and far more charismatic than Attlee ever was. If he adds even a measure of that ruthlessness when taking on the Treasury, welfare, defence and building, he has the opportunity to change the direction of the country rather than just slow its seemingly inevitable decline.

History is rarely kind to Prime Ministers, especially mid-term ones who have not faced the electorate. And it almost never hands out second chances.

Burnham has one now. He holds the levers in his hands. Will he pull them hard enough to be remembered for what he built and the opportunities he created, rather than yet another middling, mediocre, overpromoted manager of decline?

Link to the Coffee House article from May last year: https://spectator.com/article/why-do-some-irish-people-hate-israel-so-much/

Since then, like many of you, I have watched the constant rise in antisemitic violence that has slowly become Jew hate, directed at our Jewish neighbours. From spitting on buses to stabbings and the burning of Jewish volunteer ambulances in Golders Green, much of this hatred has become conflated with the wider conflict in the Middle East. People have retreated into tribal camps.

Hundreds of thousands have marched every weekend in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The rest of us have not marched. In fact, the majority of the country has stayed away. That is not because we hate Palestinians or because we condone every action of the Israeli government. It is because we understand that this is a complicated, difficult and nuanced conflict. It does not conform to our own political, religious and sectarian divides but follows its own grim rules. It has a way of punishing those who become involved and corralling them into one camp or the other.

Yet no conflict thousands of miles away can justify the level of Jew-hatred now spreading across Britain. The statistics are damning. According to recent official figures, there have been well over 100 antisemitic incidents per 10,000 Jewish people in the UK. This rate has no comparison to any other religious or ethnic group in terms of the number of incidents and the sheer violence and hatred involved.

I have wondered for some time what those of us who are not Jewish can do to show solidarity and support for our Jewish neighbours. In conversation with one of my closest friends, we asked ourselves what we could do. I wanted something small, visible and deliberately non-political that ordinary Britons could do to show our Jewish neighbours they are not alone.

The idea of a simple badge stating I stand with British Jews came about. It removes the politics, the bitterness and the tribal divisions that anything connected to Israel inevitably brings with it. We wanted to make it about Britain and about British Jews.

The badge is straightforward. It features a Union Jack with the words I stand with British Jews. As Charles Moore wrote movingly in the Telegraph recently,

“If you are offended by this, the problem is with you.”

I hope those who read this will join us on 23 July. The badges are easy to order and can be delivered within the next week or so. This is a not-for-profit campaign. We are not trying to make money. Any surplus at the end will be placed in a separate account, overseen by an accountant and trustee, and donated in full to charity.

I leave you with a simple thought experiment. Imagine you are sitting on a bus when a group of young men boards and targets a young woman because of the clothes she is wearing. They shout at her, scream at her and spit at her. Would you then demand to know whether she has spoken out against violence against Christians in Sudan? Would you blame her? Or would you blame them?

The answer, of course, should be obvious, but there are far too many, especially young people, for whom it is not.

You can order your badge here

https://i-stand-with-british-jews.myshopify.com/

The word has become so frequently used that it is intrinsically part of his brand. But the more it is used, the less meaning it has. Nice has become a strangely empty compliment, particularly when it is applied to someone who has held the power to shape society and change lives for the worse.

It is as empty and as vacuous as so much of modern political commentary and modern society. The word itself has a slightly instructive and odd etymology. It entered English from the Latin Nescius meaning ignorant or unaware, suggesting foolishness or excessive fastidiousness. It was only in the 18th and 19th centuries that it gradually shifted towards its far more modern meaning of being pleasant or agreeable.

I find the evolution revealing. The word has moved from describing a lack of judgment to describing a lack of friction. When people describe a politician as nice, they are not saying that they possess great instincts, a keen intellect, or an inquisitive mind; nor great moral courage, an instinctive feel for the country at large, or an abundance of patriotism. They are saying something far narrower.

They mean the politician is bland, anodyne, will not cause a row, is agreeable, and goes with the flow, which is, of course, deeply ignorant and foolish. Even the slightest familiarity with history should tell them where that leads, but of course history is so ‘yesterday’ to the modern left.

The great virtue required to succeed in left politics is, at all costs, to be agreeable. Everybody is right. Everybody is equal. Everybody’s truth is the same. There is no great truth. There is no universal fact. It is easy to see why such an approach appeals in the modern, woke left that values consensus above all else.

Yet a politics that prizes a leader who cares about being liked above all else will defer difficult decisions. It will avoid confrontation. It will prioritise short-term approval over long-term responsibility. I am not picking on Andy Burnham, he is just representative of the stye of politics of the modern left, his record is littered with endless examples of the same pattern.

As health secretary between 2009 and 2010, he and his predecessor ignored 81 requests for a public inquiry into the Mid Staffordshire scandal. Families whose loved ones died because of catastrophic failures in care were left waiting. Again, always, first avoid a fuss; avoid decisions; go with the path of least resistance.

Then, as a prominent northern politician and an 'ordinary bloke', his instincts were wrong about the Hillsborough families, and he was booed and jeered at Anfield, but the moment the consensus changed, so did Andy, immediately going too far the other way. Again, he made promises. He agreed with everyone and of course let everyone down.

Far worse and far more damagingly, his comments and behaviour on grooming gangs were rightly heavily criticised for downplaying the industrial-scale racially motivated sexual abuse of some of the most vulnerable people in society, young white working-class girls. Rather than confronting the issue head on, it was downplayed, smoothed over, “let’s not cause a fuss”, it’s complicated and so on, and a generation of very young, terribly vulnerable girls was destroyed to avoid a row.

None of this suggests a man driven by cruelty. It points instead to an instinct to smooth over problems rather than confront them. What is described as niceness in political life is not a positive moral quality. It is descriptive of someone who hates, dislikes and avoids conflict and values consensus over everything else, especially over the truth.

This is a far broader problem. Modern politics increasingly rewards politicians who are superficially likeable in a media environment that moves quickly and punishes friction. The ability to avoid controversy is then mistaken for good judgment and leadership. The result is the class of leaders we have.

They are good and skilled at managing their image but desperate to avoid decisions at all costs. Decisions have political costs. Decisions make you stand out. Decisions will create rows. Decisions could go wrong. A nice prime minister will defer. He will seek the middle ground, even when none clearly exists, to avoid making enemies, even when enemies need to be made or must be overcome. This is far from a minor character flaw.

It is a very serious limitation in someone who will soon hold very significant power. Strong leadership requires the willingness to disappoint people, to say no, to accept that being liked is not the purpose of holding high office. This cult of niceness obscures basic truths that we know. It encourages us to judge politicians by how agreeable they seem rather than what they do and the choices they make when times are tough.

It will be interesting to see whether the quality most frequently attributed to Andy Burnham proves to be a strength or a liability in office. The evidence so far suggests that what is routinely called niceness in politics is something far narrower, far less assuring — a preference for being liked over being effective. In the best of times this might not matter much. But these are not the best of times.

This is a turbulent and difficult period that demands leaders with conviction and strength, willing to make decisions even, and perhaps especially if sometimes it will get it wrong.

I consider myself as British as I am Irish. Half my family is British, and I have lived longer in Britain than in Ireland. I live in Oxfordshire, where I run three small village pubs with my wife, who is English.

For every Irish armchair republican singing dirges about martyrdom and 800 years of oppression at closing time, there are many of us with a much more complicated and nuanced relationship with the British part of our identity. British-Irishness is far from unusual.

The easy and free movement between Britain and Ireland exists because of the Common Travel Area. This long-standing gentlemen’s agreement has allowed Irish and British citizens to live, work, and travel freely between the two countries and the Crown Dependencies since the 1920s.

The Common Travel Area is far older than the European Union and has survived Brexit intact. It is a practical recognition that Britain and Ireland share language, history, culture, and a tightly intertwined labour market. Irish citizens join the British Armed Forces, civil service, and even government. British citizens live and work and retire in the Republic of Ireland and work in every part of the Irish private and public sector, with no need for visas or work permits. The CTA can work, but only when border security is treated with upmost seriousness and Dublin works with London.

The stabbing in Belfast that triggered nights of heavy rioting was carried out by a Sudanese national who had entered Northern Ireland via the Republic of Ireland. People-smuggling gangs have spotted this weakness and are now brazen enough to advertise their services online and, due to the laxness of Dublin, they go as far as to guarantee entry to the UK via Ireland.

Non-CTA nationals regularly fly into Ireland claiming asylum or enter irregularly and then cross into the UK with few if any checks. Ordinary people on both sides of the Irish Sea are right to ask questions. The answer is not scrapping the Common Travel Area, but serious reform must happen now to close the back door while preserving the special internal freedoms.

Ireland claims to be a wealthy country. Yet it continues to depend on the RAF and the Royal Navy to protect its skies and waters. This reliance is a bitter pill to swallow when Dublin harps on about its wealth and moral superiority. The veracity of leprechaun economics aside Dublin can certainly start paying its way on security and border control and as importantly start taking its role as a partner in the CTA seriously it enjoys the benefits, now it is time it took on the responsibilities as well.

Consecutive Irish governments have pretended the problem does not exist. This negligence, combined with an anti-British stance during Brexit born of a national inferiority complex that morphed into smug claims Brexit was mere nostalgia for empire, has damaged relations badly.

They remain in denial about their defence responsibilities, downplay the threat of Islamism, pursue British veterans while offering little help against terrorists, and once gave safe havens to those who fled after murdering Protestant farmers and shopkeepers. They have also colluded in the demonisation of the RUC and the UDR.

A government in Dublin that talks up European solidarity while talking down the UK yet still expects Britain to carry the can on security and migration enforcement, must change course.

We need stronger intelligence and real-time data sharing between UK Border Force, the police in Northern Ireland, and the Irish authorities. During the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis, Dublin took control of its airports, ports, and the border and imposed strict controls rapidly. That same determination must now be applied to migration and border security.

Governments must work together, Irelands Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) has real teeth and has gone toe to toe with some of the worst gangs in Europe CAB can and could be , if new laws and penalties are needed to stop the smuggling networks they must be legislated now.

The personal reality of the Common Travel Area is what makes it worth defending. My wife and I have moved between our two countries without paperwork. Irish recruits continue to join the British Army, Royal Navy, and RAF, and British pensioners retire to the west of Ireland. The principle remains sound. Free movement does not require either side to surrender control of external borders.

If we want to keep the arrangement working, we must treat the back door as a problem that can be fixed. The Dublin government must share intelligence faster, speed up removals, and tighten external controls.

The bond between Ireland and Britain is older and deeper than any temporary row. It deserves to be defended, but it will only survive if both sides defend it properly.

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A thousand little beer-and-music festivals spring up every weekend: steam trains, cider, bad rock music and burnt sausages. Pub gardens start to fill up.

England feels alive.

Read The Full article here At Coffee House Online:

https://spectator.com/article/the-world-cup-cant-save-englands-pubs/

And Don’t forget our day in the country on the 18th of July, there will be burnt sausages, knobbly knees the best of real ale and cider and more importantly lots of fun and interesting people. I hope to see you there.