When many people think of Israel, this dystopian image of Gaza comes readily to mind

Only two nations have come into being following a United Nations resolution: Israel in 1948 and Libya the following year.

It is quite something for the community of nations to endorse the creation of a new state and notable that after some seven decades the UN has not been inclined to doing it again after seeing how the first two creations worked out.

Libya moved from being a monarchy to becoming an erratic and internationally dangerous dictatorship, it was overthrown and replaced by an almost constant civil war.

The experience of the Israeli state stood in marked contrast. From day one it was a democracy, civil society flourished and rule of law was established.

And Israel was not short of friends in the international community. The United States rushed to provide de-facto recognition of the state and then the Soviet Union rapidly went further offering dejure recognition. Even Britain, which had just finished fighting a nasty insurgency with Zionist forces, decided to be a friend. Germany, weighed down by guilt over the Nazi Holocaust, provided vast amounts of reparations money. Other states also offered assistance and Israel established warm relations with a range of Third World countries who were intrigued by this nation building experiment and especially interested in its ingenious agricultural innovations.

The one problem, hardly a minor one, was that for Israel to exist without the existing the Palestinian population also having national rights, an inevitable conflict was created.

In 1948 the Palestinians lacked any kind of strong national voice but the surrounding Arab countries were quick to go to war with Israel on behalf of the Palestinians. Not only were the invading Arab armies defeated but Israel was able to extend its territory beyond the borders specified under the UN resolution. Another war in 1967 provided a major extension to the land under Israeli rule.

So, it seemed that Israel’s path to success was not to be written in friendship but by force of arms creating facts on the ground that could never be altered. The most optimistic reading of the situation was that the Palestinians would accept their fate and that neighbouring Arab states would eventually come to accept the Zionist entity.

That kind of optimism came only from the side of the victors. But their military prowess had done nothing to diminish Palestinian claims to the land, if anything they hardened the resistance.

Israel’s response, which barely faltered, was to rely on arms to settle the question. Earlier governments, who toyed with the concept of peaceful cohabitation, were swept away and replaced by a succession of administrations led by the successors of the Zionist terrorist organisations, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, who in turn were largely eclipsed by today’s even more extremist ultra-Zionists who do nothing to disguise their blood lust.

As the carnage has grown, Israel increasingly behaves like a rabid dog literally striking out in all directions. Piled on top of this has been the government’s willingness to allow religious zealot thugs to undertake the dirtiest of dirty work in intimidating the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

This is hardly the nation that inspired so much hope in the early days of its creation. Allies around the world who wished Israel well and materially contributed to its well-being, have grown increasingly uncomfortable. Open criticism has become commonplace and is met by Israeli officials responding with the kind of anger that is characteristic of pariah states whose alienation from the international community makes them snarl every time they are criticised.

Israel today literally only has one friend who matters, and another, China, which relishes military and technological cooperation but will hardly go the stake for the Jewish state. America, the friend who matters, is run by an erratic megalomaniac who oscillates between furious frustration with Israel and a lingering feeling of solidarity emanating from the uneasy bromance between Benjamin Netanyahu and the Orange Blob who have much in common, none of it in a good way.

But the future will not be determined by these two personalities. What matters, especially in the United States, is that their alliance had been firmly underwritten by overwhelming popular support. This is diminishing by the day, indeed American elections are being won by those who shout loudest condemning Israel. Even America’s hapless and starkly ignorant Ambassador to Israel can now be found criticising the Israeli government.

Israel, the nation brought into being by international support, is isolated in ways that it has never been isolated before. Only the kind of hubris displayed by Mr. Netanyahu, and his even more extremist allies, leads them to believe that isolation comes without consequence.

The vast military arsenal which keeps its enemies at bay relies on supplies from abroad, the financing of the state, which in Israel has never been come from internal resources alone, largely primarily relies on US aid and money from the Jewish diaspora.

The party is not over for Israel but the debris it has generated mounts by the day. The growing international mood of revulsion against the Jewish state has now captured the global public imagination in ways that will have enormous repercussions for a tiny country surrounded by enemies, some of whom tentatively wanted to be friends.

If the UN General Council vote, which brought Israel into being in 1948, were held today, the chances of it being endorsed are on a par with the Pope renouncing Christianity.

This is a minefield, so finding a way of talking about the suicide of Jason Arday, the Cambridge University professor, is precarious at best; at worst, a potential disaster. In fact it is near impossible to have a sensible discussion about race and all the issues surrounding it.

Prof. Arday was born to Ghanian immigrant parents. Black professors account for around 1 per cent of the total professorial posts in British universities. His appointment as professor of sociology of education at Cambridge University was therefore outstanding on a number of levels.

Equally outstanding was the volume of criticism over his alleged plagiarism, wilful exaggeration of his backstory and complaints about neglect of his teaching duties. He resigned from Cambridge under the pressure of these allegations and shortly thereafter took his own life.

This has triggered an avalanche of finger pointing and apportioning of blame. The Cambridge authorities are alternatively blamed for appointing him in the first place and then failing to provide a duty of care in the wake of this avalanche of personal attacks.

Genuine questioning over his academic credentials, the veracity of claims he made about his life became overwhelmed by the eagerness of the usual suspects to throw around accusations of wokeness and, yes, there was outright racism.

The first person to publicly point a finger at Prof Arday was a minor academic called Nathan Cofnas. This helped to ensure a less than rational debate. Mr Cofnas describes himself as a ‘race realist’, code words that need little explanation. He has skin in the game having been dismissed by Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in 2024 after it was deemed that his views on race challenged the College’s “core values”.

However a notably more objective investigation by a Times Higher Education journalist had previously raised more substantive questions which was withheld from publication after threats of litigation by a prestigious firm of solicitors.

Once Mr Cofnas’ allegations had been publicly aired a relentless pile-on of accusations surrounding Prof Arday ensued. This raised the question as to whether a white academic would have faced the same level of scrutiny applied to a black man.

It is certainly the case that other academic plagiarism controversies have produced nothing like this level of interest.

On the other hand, it cannot be ignored that Prof Arday was no slouch in pushing himself into the public domain and avidly courted publicity.

The shocking death of Jason Arday and the fury of his supporters, far from leading to a cessation of discussion, provoked a more intensive debate. This has underlined the immense difficulty of talking rationally about race.

Britain, with its imperial past and unsavoury history of relations with black and brown people, might be imagined to have given rise to unique problems confronting race issues. However toxic debates about race are hardly confined to the British. In America, our former colony, things may even be worse. In France, another former imperial power, race overshadows the political dialogue with the prospect of an only marginally reformed racist party seizing power. And, if anyone is deluded enough to believe that the African continent is somehow immune from racial issues, they should head for Sudan where the debate is drenched in blood.

A toxic combination of fear of the other, insecurity and a raft of economic issues, means that talking about race tends to be a proxy for talking about a great many other things. When political opportunists muscle into the debate, racism takes flight with terrible consequences.

Raw, vicious racism, is, thankfully confined to the sidelines of British life and even casual racism is a lot less prevalent than it once was.

Yet there is something about the fate of Jason Arday that has brought the scum back up to the surface. How dare this dashing black man occupy a senior position at one of our oldest universities? How blinded were the people who put him there? And, on the other side of the coin, how dare anyone question his credentials? Why was he being scapegoated?

If Prof Arday had addressed questions he was asked without resort to a very fancy law firm shutting down scrutiny. If he had chosen to address these issues in a manner other than that couched in victimhood, things may have ended differently.

But it is impossible to simply ignore the history and experience behind his story. Emotions are raw because there is much to be raw about.

Things could have been handled better but in the heat of battle, albeit a verbal battle, nuance gets lost and positions harden, leaving a binary choice over who to believe and who has right on their side.

The trite response is to say, let’s move on. A less trite response is to acknowledge the scars of racism, strengthen determination to root out racists but in doing so understand that a default tendency to ascribe racist motives to the questioning of people of colour, is self-defeating.

The reality, which is better than some people will acknowledge, is that eliminating racism has been a process of two steps forward, one step back. In other words there has been progress but it is far from smooth and far from being achieved without pain.

Jason Arday’s death is most definitively one step back.

The tools of the trade have changed but the nature of the trade appears to have changed even more… not for the better

Dear Fellow Hacks,

I am really sorry to say this but I am disappointed in you, especially those of you who ply the journalist’s trade covering politics.

As a mere a recovering journalist I suspect that my views on this matter are more than likely to do little more than stir up indifference. Yet, detached from the daily grind of reporting, I may possess the kind of perspective that eludes the working hack dashing around after stories, meeting deadlines, finding people to talk to and dealing with irascible editors who have no time for excuses - they just want results.

This perspective is telling me that some things appear to have got worse. It seems that many reporters have a quite unrealistic approach to how politics works. Then there are commentators who seem to be writing endless screeds which end up saying nothing more incisive than ‘only time will tell’.

In the audio-visual media far too much time is wasted tearing around merely to obtain better backdrops as a substitute for delivering real information. And, my-oh-my aren’t these backdrops predicable. If it’s a political report from London, standing as close as possible to the front door of Number 10 Downing Street, appears to be a must. In Washington, the White House lawn is the location of choice for implying that the reporter has some idea of what’s going on inside the building, and so on.

I am mostly prompted to write this because of reporting on the change of premiers in Britain and increasing unease over the degree to which reporters on the Washington beat have given up trying to hold the Orange Blob to account.

In Britain vast swathes of newsprint were filled with stories detailing the inadequacy of Keir Starmer as Prime Minister and endless calls for him to stepdown. When he eventually obliged there was a great collective wailing about the instability of British politics and the unfairness of a system that compelled him to do so.

Andy Burnham, his replacement, was then immediately criticized for not announcing his cabinet members and failing to unveil a detailed policy before even being delivered to Buckingham Palace to be appointed by the King.

Everyone on the political beat knows full well that he could not possibly have embarked on a round of announcements before actually assuming office, and that if he did, he would have been faced with alternative criticism on the lines of ‘who the hell does he think is? What presumption!’

Then there was moaning about reporters not being invited by Mr. Burnham for extensive interviews and accusations of dodging questions (gosh, who knew politicians did this sort of thing?).

When the new PM trundled out a small trickle of policies they were castigated for being either ‘not enough’ or ‘ill thought out’ because they were announced so quickly.

Somewhere along the line a broad media consensus developed that Ed Milliband, now installed as Foreign Secretary, should be denied exercising his undoubted economic knowledge and ministerial skills as head of the Treasury because of his ‘fanaticism’ over climate change and ‘inflexible’ determination to do something about it. This criticism comes at a time that extreme climate change has rarely been more manifest. And yet prevailing wisdom is that Mr. Milliband possess a threat for taking this seriously.

Meanwhile over at the White House, many reporters have seemingly given up exposing the incessant barrage of lies coming from the Orange Blob and his enablers. They do their best to track the inconsistencies and U-turns that are the daily bread of the Trump Administration, but regard them with a shrug, and wearily report that this is ‘the new normal’.

Worse, instead of asking the President to explain what he’s doing, they have turned him into a super pundit. What does he think about Britain’s change of premier, what does he think about football in the wake of the World Cup? And does he think that the Iranian regime is better or worse? And so on.

Covering politics has always involved following gossip and the endless intrigue which is part of the political DNA. But it seems that scuttlebutt and exaggeration is swamping serious analysis. This situation allows the loudest and most audacious populists to thrive and gives prominence to the loudest and most shameless members of the political tribe.

I entirely understand that journalists now facing much greater pressure than when I was on the job, sometimes only filing one story a day to meet deadlines that were leisurely by current standards. And, back then, we were not obliged to be multi-media hacks, writing, recording and creating images. So, it was a hell of a lot easier.

Moreover there was no pressure to compete with new media ranging from highly popular podcasters with zero journalistic experience but a mighty fine turn of phrase, to bloggers who are native click-bait creators.

So, yes, it’s bloody tough but the world of modern day hackery is filled with the same kind of immensely talented people as in previous times, who possess a deep well of knowledge.

Readers and viewers yearn for well-informed, thorough reporting. For all its many faults the legacy media is often best placed to fulfill this requirement. I still believe that quality will out.

But quality is being sacrificed for quantity and the hard slog of getting things right has been overshadowed by a need for clickbait.

This new era of high volume clickbait-led journalism, is hardly the fault of individual reporters. They have to do what their bosses tell them to do. But, it is sad to see many journalists giving up the fight for quality.

Come on hacks, you can do better. The pressure is on but journalism has always flourished when under pressure.

I know very little about football but I am something of a shyster expert, which is why I can say with some confidence that Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, is a fully-fledged shyster.

Giovanni Vincenzo Infantino, better known as simply Gianni, has achieved the extraordinary feat of taking an organisation already immersed in a miasma of sleaze and corruption to an excruciating new low with his audacious, but quickly thwarted, plan to turn the great game of football into a commercial opportunity for a handful of extremely rich people.

Mr. Infantino embraces all the many attributes that are essential for shyster-ism. Shysters tend to be smart people, but not in a good way as they use their skills for grabbing money from wherever it is in reach. They are immoral because arrogance leads them to embrace a way of behaving which values winning regardless of the cost to others. Deceit, manipulation and coercion are seen as no more than ends justifying the means. And, of course, they are ruthless in pursuit of fame and fortune.

Hubris, almost always, is their Achilles Heel. The giant egos which propel these people into shyster-ism means that they rarely know when they have gone too far. So they plunge on, oblivious of the need to stop and thus have to halted by others.

Mr. Infantino’s plan to put the ‘beautiful game’ at the service of a small band of the rich and powerful fellow shysters was quickly seen for what it was. His reliance on bribery and sheer willpower to push it through, failed to take account of the fact that most people, even in the higher echelons of football administration, have a deep commitment to their sport and its people.

He knew better than most, the history of corruption and unethical behaviour which has characterized FIFA for a very long time. Sepp Blatter, his predecessor as president of the federation, remains banned from the game after his serial corruption was unearthed. The leaders of many other national football associations have been exposed for their nefarious activities. And football clubs throughout the world have been taken over by dodgy tycoons and governmental bodies keen to ‘sports-wash’ their poor reputations.

This is the kind of world where Mr. Infantino feels at home. He spent many years working closely with the worst of the worst and so had grounds for assuming that a plan to exploit football in a more fundamental fashion was nothing more than a continuation of a well- established process of subverting the ‘beautiful game’.

He assumed that everyone else at the top of football was as mesmerized as himself by the mighty dollar. He must have known that selling off the World Cup would incur some kickback but calculated that it would be manageable by moving fast to catch the opposition off-guard and by dangling impressive payback before the eyes of fellow FIFA executives in an offer they would find hard to refuse.

The thing about shysters is that they live in a world largely inhabited by other shysters so that the appalling behaviour which is their norm, is the standard by which they judge how everyone else operates.

No surprise then that Mr. Infantino made it his business to get as close as possible to the Orange Blob in the White House and draw his son-in law’s brother into the scheme for monetising FIFA.

My experience of meeting shysters, from all walks of life, is that their critics focus too much on their venality and pay insufficient attention to the fact that they tend to be intelligent, annoyingly amiable and devious enough to conceal their motives, especially from the folk who get screwed.

However, there are always tell-tale signs. First up is greed. Second up is vanity and third is harder to define, but somehow you just know when you are in close proximity, that there is something just not right going on.

The easiest way to expose a shyster is to adopt the time-honoured advice of following the money because at the end of the day the money stash will provide the clearest evidence of venality.

Whatever happens to Mr. Infantino, he is unlikely to become poor but in his world where friendship is transactional, he is likely to find his besties disappearing because he is no longer of use to them.

While at the top of their game these shysters appear to be infallible, in disgrace they rapidly become isolated, some even go to jail. Good old Gianni may well not end up behind bars but isolation and vilification will haunt his remaining days. He has only himself to blame.

The bin versus the demagogue

At one level it is a farce, at another level a splendid display of British eccentricity but somewhere in this mix is a serious political event.

The event is the Clacton by-election to be held on 13 August. It has attracted no less than 34 candidates, three of whom claim to adhere to the Monster Raving Looney Party, most of whom have never been heard of. And then there is Nigel Farage who caused the election by standing down as MP for Clacton.

Mr. Farage is one of the most skilled politicians in Britain and, arguably, the most dangerous. He despises modern Britain, consistently engages in scapegoating minorities to explain the nation’s ills and has a nasty authoritarian streak that threatens to undermine fine British traditions of tolerance.

The only reason this election is taking place is because he hopes to dispel a mounting barrage of questions and official inquiries into his behaviour. It is nothing more than a Trump-style diversion which, he believes, will give him a fresh mandate from the people of Clacton.

If Mr. Farage is right this mandate will have been achieved despite his Reform Party becoming increasingly immersed in a slew of allegations over dodgy money, association with a convicted criminal who showered the party leader with cash and yet more cash from a crypto-millionaire who is so committed to Britain that he lives in Thailand. Then there is association with criminals and hardline racists within his own party, and the drumbeat of Mr. Farage’s endless greed as he takes time out to flog gold bullion, appear on a greetings app and basically make himself available to the highest bidder.

The by-election plan was to get all the other major political parties to stand in this godforsaken constituency and give them a good beating at the polls.

For once, these parties collectively showed some commonsense and declined to play along. That left him to face a ragbag of opponents, including a few who believe he is insufficiently racist, some who just like to see their names in the newspapers and, as it turns out, just one leading opponent who rejoices in the name of Count Binface who, as the name suggests, spends his time lumbering around encased in a large rubbish bin.

Count Binface’s actual name is Jonathan David Harvey. His policies include reducing the price of chocolate flake ice cream to 99p and inviting members of the European Union to join the United Kingdom.

In the great British tradition of parody and satire Count Binface has serious intent lurking behind this jolly façade of eccentricity. He understands that most Brits are loath to be accused of taking things too seriously and are more than willing to laugh, rather than cry when faced with a difficult problem.

Many of the other by-election candidates are also seriously intent on absurdity but Count Binface has managed to capture the lion’s share of the attention.

Britain is supposed to be a nation disinclined towards extremism but what had previously been out there on the fringes of politics has now moved into the mainstream. The Conservative Party, once the bastion of being, er, conservative, has now embraced extreme isolation positions, moved to a place where the demonization of immigrants and contempt for civil rights is part of its core offering.

It is however the case that the UK has, thankfully, yet to experience the shocking violence of right wing populists in places, such as Ecuador, Argentina and Israel, but British politics is now regularly shaken by attacks on immigrants and both the Muslim and Jewish communities are increasing facing attacks from individuals and groups claiming to be motivated by some kind of ideology.

How far this shift toward violence will go remains to be seen but in the meantime a rubbish bin is doing the heavy lifting in challenging Nigel Farage.

We prefer the challenge to be irreverent but the stakes are high as the Reform Party remains a viable contender for election victory.

It’s first step, for the time being, has been to organise a circus in Clacton and the biggest of the clowns taking part in this charade is no joke because he is challenging the core values of this green and pleasant land. That’s not so funny.

July has been a really good month for Britain. It has proved that in a fast changing world we Brit’s remain stolidly unchanged and indeed predictable.

Let me explain: Britain is at its best when challenged by the new and the different, because, unlike foreigners, we know how to effortlessly obstruct change and have a glorious history of resistance to the new.

On 20 July Britain was presented with a new government; changes of this kind tend to be greeted with a degree of excitement in Abroad but not so in the United Kingdom where anything new generates scepticism. Thus the accession of Andy Burnham to the premiership has sparked rather more rumbling than excitement

We rumble because we are conditioned to be disappointed by our rulers. Unlike foreigners, we see no reason to give a new administration the benefit of the doubt because we fully expect the new administration to end up being the same as the last.

In this Sceptred Isle trust in government is perennially low and provides fertile grounds for complaint which is just as well because we have a great deal to complain about. To be frank, complaining is something of a British speciality.

I am personally ready to join the complainers because ever since Mr. Burnham came to power, a couple of days ago, my standard of living has not budged one inch. Moreover I am staggered that the new PM has said absolutely nothing about this new trend for natural nails. His silence on the nail revolution shows how utterly out of touch he is. Does he not realise that the very many nail salons throughout the land face an existential crisis as naturalism rears its ugly head? Nails matter and if anyone reading this does not know why they really should try to keep up.

Obviously it was also good that England failed to win the football World Cup because while England fans chant’ we’re bring it home’, we all know that we are far better at loosing than winning even though we are burdened by having a German manager who threatened to impose the Teutonic tradition of seriousness on our team. He was even that close to inflicting the scar of victory on us. As a foreigner he probably does not understand quite how vulgar that is.

July also saw an outbreak of hot weather, which, as you know, is far worse than cold weather because that’s what we’re used to. More importantly, if Britain starts having reliably hot summers, how on earth are we going to complain about the rotten British summer? Ed Milliband, the minister in charge of energy and hence weather, committed the grave error of planning for something called a net zero future. I am not sure what that is but it probably explains why everyone is so hot and bothered. So, it is only right that he has been removed from that post and has a new job dealing with foreigners… serves him right.

Also in July we have been tormented by the totally unfair way that a future leader of This Great Nation has had to face questions about his money, his chums and a number of other things.

I am indeed talking about Nigel Farage, the martyr, who suffered a childhood in a posh school, alleviated only by serial baiting of Jewish boys, or harmless banter about gas chambers, as he has explained it. Then he was forced into the City to earn an honest buck as a commodities trader, but, while others made squillions, he did not, which is jolly unfair. So he turned to politics where he chummed-up with a range of fine folk who do indeed have squillions and are handing out their largesse to Nigel, who modestly proclaims that he thoroughly deserves every penny flowing his way.

Why on earth is he being criticised for all this? He’s made it very clear that he is a Man of the People and, above all, really dislikes foreigners.

But us Brits don’t like tall poppies, so he is being cut down to size by a conspiracy of deranged lefties and deep state actors who want him put back in his box (the imposition of Sharia Law in London is also probably somewhere in that mix).

So, July has restored business as usual on the political front but on the actual business front, comes the terrible news that Britain’s economic growth, albeit anaemic, is rather better than that of people like the sharp-elbowed Germans and the feckless French. This surely cannot be right? Thankfully the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been sacked for bringing it about.

We haven’t got to the end of July quite yet, but I am pretty confident that any hint of good news can easily be swatted away, that the HS2 hi-speed railway will still be stalled as construction costs reach a new stratosphere and, of course, there will be holiday chaos at Britain’s airports for which foreigners are squarely to blame.

As George Orwell famously said, ‘the English are not happy unless they are miserable.’ To which I would add the caveat, ‘and can blame someone else for our misery’. Let’s hope that the coming month will be every bit as disappointing as the current one.

The ignoramuses who are imposing the will of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on Hong Kong know very little of Karl Marx, even though his theories are supposedly the foundation stone of the Party’s beliefs, but their ignorance is no barrier to proving him right in at least one respect.

Marx famously predicted that world history and the famous people who mould it are fated to see events evolve first as tragedy and second as farce.

The tragedy played out in the crushing of liberty in Hong Kong is all too evident. And now comes the farce as the numbskulls installed by Beijing to do their bidding are pursuing what can only be described as an obsession over Chloe Cheung, which began when she was 19-years old. She is now a 21-year old and the pressure has, if anything, increased.

At the age of 19, Ms Cheung was accused, without any semblance of legal process, of inciting secession and colluding with foreign powers to endanger national security. A bounty was placed on her head and ‘wanted’ posters issued but the authorities could only conjure up a school photo of her aged 11 for the simple reason that they had no record of her ‘criminality’ in Hong Kong.

Her ‘crime’ has been to become a dedicated pro-democracy advocate in Britain, her new home. The views she has expressed are unquestionably legal under British law. But China insists that it has extra-territorial legal powers. Thus they dream of being able to shove her in front of a hand-picked Hong Kong judge who will do the Party’s bidding and lock her away for a great many years.

For this to happen, the Hong Kong authorities need extract her from the UK. They will not even attempt to go to a British court to achieve their aim because, even they know, that in a genuine legal system, their absurd case for extradition would be treated with derision.

This being so, the Hong Kong authorities have placed a HK$1 million (approx. £100,000) bounty on her head, largely for performative purposes but also on the off chance that the motley collection of freelance thugs they employ overseas might find a way of smuggling her out.

She is among a number of other overseas Hong Kong dissidents who are subject to this crude but pathetic attempt to circumvent the legal process in jurisdictions where the rule of law prevails.

All of the 19 people who have had bounties placed on their heads have been targeted for endless intimidation but Ms Cheung has become the subject of distinctive obsession. She is however fortunate that her family is safe in Britain. Others on the wanted list have seen relatives remaining in Hong Kong, harassed and even jailed.

Because the Hong Kong authorities think they are above the law in other jurisdictions they believe they have the right to maintain an intimidation campaign, including sexual harassment. This close monitoring is accompanied by self-righteous declarations of the need to bring Ms Cheung to justice, the sort of justice honed to excruciating imperfection by the Chinese Communist Party.

Recently, Ms Cheung has been granted indefinite right to remain in Britain, the precursor to a right to citizenship. As she is being carefully monitored by the extensive CCP surveillance network, which operates in Britain and elsewhere outside China’s borders, it did not take long for the authorities to hear of this development.

Rounding up the usual rent-a-crowd in Hong Kong, ‘concerned citizens’ were mobilised to hold a rather pathetic little protest outside the British Consulate where Britain was ‘resolutely’ denounced and Ms Cheung condemned for ‘absconding and hiding in the UK’.

She is far from hiding in Britain and has become a notably articulate and persistent critic of the regime. Indeed she has received international awards for her advocacy and provided testimony to law makers.

This partially explains why she is a target of the Hong Kong government’s ire but the obsession is something else. Maybe it is precisely because of Chloe Cheung’s youth and gender. Maybe it is because she is such an effective campaigner and maybe they are exasperated by the fact that she refuses to be intimidated.

I suspect that it is combination of all these things but at its heart lies the irredeemable sexism of a group of middle-aged grey men who simply cannot get their heads around the fact while she gets a pretty good hearing in the world beyond Hong Kong, their own representatives and hapless apologists, are largely shunned and rarely believed.

So, they are left, like petulant teenagers, raging at Ms Cheung and staging performative events which underline their impotence in ways they appear not to understand.

It is, as Marx says, a case of first time tragedy, second time farce.

Bibi and the Blob: their bromance is over

Ever since the foundation of the Israeli state, America and Israel appear to have been tied together by an umbilical cord. Without mountains of US aid and weapons Israel could never have become the dominant military power in the Middle East, nor could it have weathered the diplomatic isolation it now faces.

But this state of affairs may be juddering to a halt as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu blusters his way through with extremist policies and is impervious to criticism.

Israel’s staunchest supporters in the outside world, would prefer to offer unequivocal support but are facing a reality that makes this impossible.

On the other hand, Israel’s staunchest opponents, who see the US and Israel as a two-headed monster, are having to grapple with the reality that their favourite monster has been split in half which produces the unwelcome intrusion of nuance.

It had seemed that as long as Donald Trump, Bibi’s ‘closest friend’ was in office, the two would be inseparable. But that is no longer the case as they have fallen out…big time. The Orange Blob is characteristically capricious, so a change of mind is par for the course but this is something much bigger.

According to an impeccably sourced new book from New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swain, Trump’s exasperation with Mr Netanyahu reached a point where he told him, ‘everybody’s sick of you, Bibi. All the Jews are sick of you’. ( An exchange which neither side has denied.)

The immediate consequence of this fallout is that the Israeli premier will be called upon to shoulder the blame for the disastrous Israeli-American attack on Iran from which President Trump is trying to extricate himself.

Mr Netanyahu, a man for whom hubris has no meaning, has long believed that although other US presidents, notably Joe Biden, found him to be exasperating, he could always count on getting them to bend to his will because of the wide backing for Israel within the US.

That backing however is eroding by the day. Last March a Gallup survey found only 46% of Americans expressed support for Israel (the lowest level in 25 years of Gallup’s annual tracking) while a record 33% said they sympathised with the Palestinians. Polls taken since suggest that support for Israel has dwindled much further.

The sea change in attitudes towards Israel, once seen as a plucky democracy facing barbaric opposition from Muslim zealots, has now turned on its head as the devastation in Gaza, the barbarity of the bombings in Lebanon and the behaviour of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, has raised serious questions over how Israel treats its neighbours.

Yet one group of Americans is unshaken in enthusiasm for Israel – the highly influential messianic Christian right wing who believe that the continuing flourishing of the State of Israel is a requirement for the second coming of the Messiah.

Conveniently overlooked in Israel, and elsewhere for that matter, is the embarrassing insistence that once the second coming occurs Israel will need to become a Christian country without Jews, who, presumably, will have to leave or convert.

As other formerly staunch allies shy away Israeli officials are left scurrying around the global sewage pit to find friends among leaders of racists and neo-fascist groups.

Even within the diaspora Jewish community, the idea of Israel right or wrong is fading. Despite all the talk of antisemitism forcing overseas Jews to flee to Israel, most of the people getting on the planes to Tel Aviv are ultra-religious Jews. Again, unspoken, is the fact that many of them are anti-Zionist Haredi Jews who, despite getting preferential treatment in Israel, despise the secular Jewish state and think it has usurped the will of God by coming into existence before the Almighty has deemed it permissible.

Even the most avid Israeli apologists, who had a go at questioning the number of those killed in Gaza, insisted that all Gazans were part of the Hamas blood cult and worked themselves up into a fervour over accusations of Israeli genocide, are increasingly opting for silence.

All that remains are indignant claims that opposing Israel is equivalent to antisemitism and that Jews who oppose the government only do so because they are self-hating.

Optimists believe that Israel’s general election in October will see Bibi finally removed from office and that a more reasonable government will take over. The problem is that even if this happens (something that is far from certain) and the more rabid members of the current ruling coalition are removed, the centre of gravity in Israeli politics has swung far to the right. The once dominant parties advocating a form of liberal Zionism, are now of minor electoral significance. A new government will probably be less intransigent than the current one but will be tied to a set of policies that have no chance of bringing some kind reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians.

As movement on this front is static what will happen to the massive overseas aid and weaponry that Israel relies upon?

If Israeli hubris continues to rely on military might to preserve the status quo, those who believe in this mirage might care to revisit the history of Ottoman domination of the Middle East, which lasted a lot longer than the current State of Israel and, in its time, seemed to be impregnable, right up to the moment when it wasn’t .

Don’t look so worried Andy, it’s all good for you

The Trump magic is finally working and Andy Burnham, who is poised to become Britain’s next Prime Minister, could well be a beneficiary, but not in the way that the Orange Blob in the White House imagined.

Let me explain, President Trump has denounced Mr. Burnham before he has even been handed the keys of No. 10 Downing Street. This is a gift that should not be squandered because getting in the Blob’s bad books works wonders for enhancing popularity.

The Trump magic has worked elsewhere in the world; it was extremely helpful securing Mark Carney’s defeat of his Trump loving opponent in Canada. He has subsequently enhanced his status by remaining on the White House shit list.

In Italy the Blob’s most stalwart European ally, Georgia Meloni, has got quite a boost after Trump turned on her for reasons that remain mystifying. She has hit back hard and gained enormous support for so doing.

Even Chancellor Merz in Germany, who has been languishing in the opinion polls, got a shot in the arm from across the Atlantic when he made it clear that he was less than enamoured by the Blob.

And it works the other way around. Thus, the seemingly undefeatable Hungarian premier Viktor Orban was humbled in the polls after the Blob went so far as to despatch his vice-president to meddle in Hungary’s general election.

Only in Latin America has the Trump magic actually worked in the way that the White House assumed it would. Thus it was helpful in elections for allies in Argentina, Colombia and El Salvador but the more direct intervention in Venezuela has preserved a far more unpopular regime, which, unsurprisingly, is not rushing to hold an election.

The other deeply unpopular regime that has tightened its grip on power thanks to the Blob, is the Islamic leadership in Iran which was challenged on the streets before the Israeli-American invasion and is now gleefully adorning the streets with images of a defeated American President, which is sort of true in as much as American cack-handed attempts at regime change have resulted in regime reinforcement.

Meanwhile even Keir Starmer, the outgoing British prime minister, got a rare boost to his popularity when he suddenly developed sufficient backbone to decline orders from the White House.

Before the backbone emerged he was in grovel mode, maintaining that he was doing so in the national interest. But what he discovered, and could have quite easily found out, had he cared to look, was that no amount of grovelling can satisfy the Blob’s ego. Sure, it can get results, such as lower tariff increases, but this kind of benefit disappears at the speed of light when a supplicant stops grovelling for even a moment.

Standing up to bully has also worked back in the USA where Trump’s dislike of candidates has fuelled their campaigns for office. None have benefited more than New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani who stormed to victory while the Blob did everything he could to stop him getting elected. Once this failed he was graciously received in the White House because, like all bullies, the Blob has a kind of respect for those who stand up to him.

In the hot house of American politics the President still commands a base who follow him with fervour. This works within the context of selecting Republican candidates where a Trump-supporter has a pretty good chance of being chosen. However that candidate then has to face the wider electorate, which means the majority of people who are not part of the cult. At this point things have every chance of going wrong for the White House where urgent plans are being laid to rig upcoming elections.

The riggers, rather obviously. do not admit it, but they sort of understand that Donald Trump has become an enormous election liability which can only be eradicated by changing the rules of the game.

Although the election riggers in the White House would dearly love to be able to change the rules beyond America’s borders, they are powerless in this respect.

So, it looks as though the Blob has handed Mr. Burnham quite a bump. While he can use Trump aversion to his advantage, it would be unwise to spend too much time preoccupied by the Blob’s reaction to his policies.

But if he is minded to capitalise on dislike of the Blob, Mr Burnham could do a lot worse than follow the example set by Mr. Carney in Canada who avoids rising to the bait but makes clear his determination to tread a path that is much despised by his nemesis in the White House.

The Blob accuses opponents of having Trump Derangement Syndrome, not least because he believes that everything is about him. He is only partially wrong because while having him in the other corner is an advantage, it does not amount to derangement, merely an advantage that should not be squandered.

Clement Attlee, an unusually modest politician without a saviour complex but real achievements

In a world of political uncertainty, two things are entirely certain: voters yearn for leaders with the magic touch that will provide answers to more or less all of their problems and once such a person has been elected, disillusion sets in.

In Britain, where the deeply unpopular Keir Starmer is about to be replaced by Andy Burnham, expectations are high and even before the new incumbent manages to find the kettle in his new Downing Street abode, doubts about his ability to do the job are being aired with glee by the usual suspects.

Yet, Mr Burnham has been proclaimed to be the Labour Party’s saviour, a man with a popular touch and a plausible record of getting things done in Manchester, where he served as mayor.

As Tony Blair, Britain’s longest serving Labour Prime Minister, ruefully observed, the ‘journey of being in government is that you start at your most popular and least capable, and you end at your most capable and least popular.’

Many critics will question whether Sir Tony was indeed at his most capable when he finally stepped down but his basic point remains that high expectations lead to high levels of disappointment.

Were this purely a British phenomenon it could be considered to be a quirk of a system which lacks a constitutional process for replacing prime ministers yet has recently seen a heavy churn of Downing Street incumbents.

Elsewhere, notably in the United States, there is a clearly defined process for getting rid of an unsuitable president, but it is little used despite the proliferation of deeply unpopular presidents, not least the current incumbent who has transformed the seat of power into a Liberace tribute shrine.

President Trump blustered into power for a second time promising to slash and burn his way through the political system and restore greatness to America. His avid supporters expected him not to be diverted by overseas military adventures, they were convinced that he could make living standards rise and that he would somehow magic away all the problems that have contributed to the demise of American power.

He has done none of these of things but because the Trump presidency has become cult-like, members of the cult are disinclined to believe the evidence of their own eyes and so overlook a stark failure to deliver but outside the cult there appears to be a majority of people who are increasingly angry and will soon have an opportunity to express that anger at the polls.

As long as the democratic system of government holds, the opportunity to get rid of the miscreants ensures that the system does not collapse.

This is why the very worst of the charlatans, who have worked the democratic system, very rapidly tear it down as soon as they have the power to do so. This was seen most dramatically in Germany following the rise of the Nazis but also elsewhere, such as in Hungary where the Oban government travelled far down the road of authoritarian government but didn’t make it in the end. Throughout Africa, post-independence governments rode to power on great surges of enthusiasm but turned to destroying the system that elected them as soon as it became clear that free elections would spell their demise.

No one seriously believes that Andy Burnham will try to destroy British democracy but, my oh my, there is an impressive list of things he is expected to do including really big stuff such as relieving growing poverty, providing decent housing, ensuring that the defense of the nation is adequately financed, reducing the massive debt burden, growing the economy, calming the heated immigration debate and, presumably, ensuring peace and goodwill on earth.

If Mr. Burnham dares to suggest that expectations are too high, he will be castigated for lack of ambition. If, on the other hand, he adopts a piecemeal approach, he can be criticized for lack of direction and if, goodness me, he opts for a more radical approach which involves a radical programme of reform, the accusations of extremism and recklessness will flow thick and fast.

It very much looks as though the cycle of excitement and disillusion will be repeated. There is however an alternative. It involves brutal honesty about the job to be done accompanied by a frank declaration of the limitation to prime ministerial power. That’s just a scene setter, then comes the business of setting realistic targets for getting things done and being laser-focused on meeting those targets, with heads rolling where failure is apparent.

It is hard to know whether it will work but what has regularly been tried is ploughing on at half cock, retreating then, inching forward again and then claiming results that are not visible to the naked eye.

The only politician in modern British political history who chose another path was Clement Attlee, now acknowledged as the principal architect of Britain’s post-war recovery and creation of the welfare state. He had been derided by his Winston Churchill as a being ‘a modest man with much to be modest about’.

But he had immodest ambitions for Britain, was comfortable enough in his own skin to bring formidable political figures, with widely differing views, into his cabinet. Churchill’s mockery did not prevent Attlee’s landslide election victory but the ailing wartime leader had the last laugh when he defeated Attlee at a subsequent election despite presenting the public with nothing resembling a plan aside from evoking the ‘Great Man’ notion of leadership.

Life sure ain’t fair, and in politics, fairness does not come into it. If Mr. Burnham is looking for fairness in the world of politics he might as well give up now. Failing that he could reflect on Attlee’s advice to colleagues that they would be judged by what they succeeded in doing not by what they attempted to do.

Britain had a collective moment of madness ten years ago when a majority of the electorate instructed the government to leave the European Union.

A decade on the consequences have slowly emerged: on the economic front GDP has declined by some 6 to 8%, investment is 8 to 12% lower and productivity has shrunk by up to 4%. Once a major player in the world’s largest political and trading block, Britain now sits on the sidelines. Besides this there is the more intangible but nonetheless immensely damaging effect of exclusion from scientific and technological endeavour, the loss of opportunities, especially for young people, to experience life overseas. And, casting a long shadow, is the creeping poison of ultra nationalism.

No wonder that public sentiment towards Brexit has moved decisively in a different direction and no wonder that Nigel Farage, the man, who above all, campaigned for Brexit, prefers to dodge discussing Brexit’s consequences apart from dark mutterings about how it would have been alright if it had been done properly.

There is something impressive, albeit not in a good way, about Mr. Farage’s ability to sense the public mood and lean into it or, in this case, prudently lean away.

The feint-hearts in government should pay more attention because while he washes his hands of the consequences of the bonfire he set alight, they cannot bring themselves to confront him with his responsibility.

Worse, even though the people who run the government are well aware of the damage done by Brexit, they fear making decisive moves to put things right. On the one hand, they are terrified of a braying right wing press quick to denounce them for ‘going back on Brexit’ and on the other are loath to confront political opportunists like Mr. Farage, who scream U-turn every time the government tries to move closer to the EU and patch up the more obvious problems.

Remorseless timidity is the hallmark of the Starmer administration which ends up getting blamed for the original stupidity of Brexit and is blamed gain for failing to make bold attempts to fix the problem.

Instead of admitting that every single promise of the Brexit campaign has proved to be false, the fast fading prime minister and his hapless band of ministers cluck around muttering ‘honouring the will of the people’ as an excuse for inaction.

Why don’t these muppets see what the odious Nigel Farage sees so clearly – the will of the people has changed. The liberation from the bureaucrats of Brussels has turned out to be a potage of slush.

Re-entry to the EU is probably not a feasible alternative for the time being and, you can bet your bottom Euro, that the EU would extract a heavy price for British re-entry. Yet, greater closeness is quite doable and all this talk of limiting cooperation behind red lines turns closeness into measured distance - a sheer waste of time.

There is a great deal not to like about the European Union and Britain gave up its considerable power to make improvements from within. From outside it is however possible to make the more obvious moves towards trade alignment, common investment programmes and, yes, more open borders with the EU, so as to mitigate the damage.

The doomed project of humiliating flattery of the Trump administration and cosying up to the vile dictatorship in China as a way of dodging around the obvious solution of getting closer to Britain’s neighbours, is simply not working.

The pathetic running around the world to sign bi-lateral trade deals has mainly resulted in Britain getting agreements that are, at best, no better than could have been obtained by being part of the deals signed by a much more powerful EU.

There is no need to ram the stupidity of the Brexit referendum down people’s throats. We all make mistakes; smart people learn from them, dumb people think that pretending that no mistake has been made will somehow make it disappear.

So, not so happy 10^th anniversary – maybe a new Prime Minister with a plausible northern accent and proclivity towards casual attire, might be able to inject some commonsense here.

It takes a shovelful of journalistic genius to get me to read about football, yet I used to avidly follow Hunter Davies’ footie column in the New Statesman.

And it takes an impressive amount of journalistic chutzpah for someone like me to dare to write about football, not least on the eve of the World Cup and yet here we are.

The reason I loved Hunter Davies’ football writing is not just because his extraordinary enthusiasm for the game shone through but also because he looked at footie through its human angle. He was interested in the personalities of the participants, the supporters and the complex issues of coping with the emotional highs and lows that are integral to the game.

It’s not that I am unaware of the Beautiful Game, nor of its description as being much more serious than a matter of life and death (courtesy of the legendary Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly), but it bores me.

I blame my schooling for this as I was a pupil at the Holloway School for Boys, an Arsenal school to its very fingertips. If you were useless as a football player, you could expect to be regarded as useless in a whole host of ways. If you dared not to support the Gunners, you needed to be good at self-defence. And if you were daft enough to suggest that footie was anything less serious than life and death, it was a confirmation of total ignorance.

I am not entirely stupid so I pretended to be passionate about the Arsenal (the correct pronunciation, is in three syllables: ar-sen-all). However buried within my truculent teenage soul was a rebellion against the team, the game and everything associated with kicking a leather ball into a net.

And yet when I recently saw the red tide of Arsenal supporters flooding through the streets of Holloway and Highbury to salute the victories of both the men’s and women’s teams in a sheer frenzy of joy, something definitely stirred.

This area of North London is about as multicultural as it gets and gentrification has added a significant middle class element to what had been a predominantly working class zone.

So, the Borough of Islington is characterised by diversity, and it is frequently mocked by ignorant critics unfortunate enough to live elsewhere. But on this Sunday their mocking was irrelevant, the scumbags who are seeking to excite racial warfare did not dare show their faces and no one was out and about checking the social class of the people on the street.

This, then, is the magic of football and even the most hardened footie-shunner cannot ignore it.

Contrast this with what plays out at the upper echelons of football presided over by the widely discredited, corrupt and exploitative FIFA which sits atop the global sport, organising the World Cup and claiming to be the game’s authorised voice.

FIFA’s current president, the absurd Gianni Infantino, has gone so far as to invent a special global peace prize to pander to the insatiable ego of the Orange Buffon in the White House.

Mr. Infantino helped engineer America’s hosting of this year’s World Cup in a nation that threatens to bar both players and supporters who fall short of the demands of MEGA purity. Where pricing for this event has soared to levels that ensure the exclusion of ordinary football supporters. And where there is widespread belief that football is an entirely different sport; go figure.

This disjuncture between a game that brings out the best in people and the worst in the people who preside over football, is painted in vivid colours by events surrounding the World Cup.

And it has to be said that football can also bring out the worst among supporters who see matches as an opportunity to practice their finest racism and ultra nationalism.

Thankfully, they are in a minority, albeit a highly visible minority, overshadowed by football supporters who actually appreciate the deep multi-racialism of the game, they are, for example, vividly aware of the devastating impact were anyone mad enough to suggest excluding black players from the national teams of England and France. And so this is only contemplated by the truly deluded.

I am only deluded up to a point and for quite different reasons. Thus I can write that we, note shameless use of the collective noun, are the winners. The latent Arsenal gene must be stirring somewhere in my person because there is no doubt that we done good. There is, after all, nothing better than to be on the winning side.

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Chow Ting-hang, keeping Hong Kong safe from democracy while keeping his girlfriend ( and, er, colleague) warm

If I wrote about this while still being in Hong Kong there is little doubt that members of the National Security Police would be at my door in the early hours of the morning. The premises would be ransacked, electronic devises confiscated and I would be arrested for breaches of the National Security Law, most of which carry long prison sentences with virtually no hope of acquittal in a legal system where only hand-picked judges preside.

The crucial point here is that I am not in Hong Kong and the less important point is that I am disinclined towards heroism. So I am free to write about something which cannot be written about in the place where this saga is being played out.

Hongkongers reading this will already have guessed that the story in question concerns Chow Tin-Hang, the newly promoted Director of Public Prosecutions and one of his subordinates, Yeung Mei-ki.

The two have been engaged in an extra-marital affair, which is arguably morally dubious and has now been politically weaponised under the banner of the National Security Law because Mr Chow has been promoted, in part because of his vigorous prosecution of cases against pro-democracy activists. And because the two of them have misused public money to fund their trysts while allegedly working on national security cases.

At one stage their essential work of keeping Hong Kong safe from democracy is said to have involved using taxpayers’ money to buy a HK$1,000 (approx. £100) pink birthday cake for Ms Yeung, but more was spent on hiring luxury hotel rooms for them to ‘work’ over public holidays.

There has been no denial of the affair, nor the abuse of public funds, but the newly energised ‘patriots’ running the Hong Kong government have been quick off the mark trying to unearth the whistleblower(s) who have brought this matter to public attention. Indeed a witch hunt is underway to find and punish them.

The people who run the regime combine an exquisite combination of stupidity, arrogance and incompetence, which is the hallmark of all repressive regimes anywhere in the world where accountability is unknown and loyalty is always valued over competence. They therefore assume that the public will only get to know what the state wants them to know.

Thus, the Justice Department has been trying to intimidate staff into snitching on the whistle blowers and local media has been prevented from reporting on this scandal. However Hong Kong is a small place and word spreads quickly regardless of attempts to muzzle the media.

But the fears lingers that more vigorous attempts will be made to ensure that the government has total control of information. Hong Kong’s current curbs on the internet could be extended to match the cyber wall that blankets Mainland China and they might move to shutter the few remaining independent news outlets.

In some ways this scandal is a minor matter, even though it involves one of the leading actors in the fast developing process of weaponising the law. But it offers a small window into what happens when accountability no longer prevails and the regime has free reign to do what it wants.

In Mainland China’s much better established authoritarian regime, this lack of accountability has produced a level of corruption which poisons the system at every single level. It ranges from bribes required to obtain access to public services, much larger bribes to more senior officials for government contracts and the mountain of corrupt cash swilling around the very highest levels of the Communist Party.

The situation is so bad that literally millions of people have been prosecuted for corruption and Xi Jinping, the Party leader, has been forced to order serial crackdowns. But the crackdowns at the top of the poisoned tree only affect those who challenge the leader’s power, mere corruption is allowed to flourish.

Hong Kong has some way to go to match the levels of venality which prevail up North but it is a very rich place, so the fruits of corruption are potentially greater. The senior levels of the bureaucracy have already been largely purged of the kind of hard working, competent officials who used to run the system and so the scene is set for a corruption wave that will descend on the already weakened system.

When this torrent finally erupts the HK$1,000 pink birthday cake will be looked upon as a slightly eccentric reminder of a golden age when corruption was only nibbling away at the edges.

One of the great joys of returning to live in Britain after a long absence overseas is to be reminded of the sheer barmy-ness of how things work here when it comes to bank holidays, the latest of which has just ended.

Other nations have public holidays, labour days, saint’s days and all the rest but in Britain, since 1871, public holidays are defined by when the banks are closed.

This is odd on a number of levels starting with the word holiday, obviously derived from the term holy days but in secular Britain holiness is not what it once was. And, for that matter, banks are not what they once were as most banking corporations have abandoned the quaint practice of running branches on main thoroughfares, so a shrinking number of people actually visit a bank, although they can share the joy of waiting on the phone to call them.

The inner pedant in me wants to mobilise the Great British public for a name change but I am vividly aware that no one really cares and that the subject is too fraught for further messing around.

Being Britain, it is fair to say that the most important aspect of bank holidays is the weather. In the days prior to a bank holiday there is endless discussion about what kind of weather will prevail and, on the day of the holiday there is always plenty to say about how awful the weather has turned out to be.

Mostly this is because rain is a semi-mandatory requirement for bank holidays but occasionally, as was this case for this recent May Bank Holiday, temperatures soared to record levels.

Fortunately there are plentiful grounds for complaint either way around. If it is dull and the sky releases torrents of water, we Brits can complain about the bank holidays being a washout. When it is hot, there are also fertile grounds for complaint, because sunburn is about to be unleashed, people declare that they can hardly move for the heat and British buildings are just not equipped for hot weather (nor cold for that matter) but we are all jolly brave in these circumstances.

In Hong Kong, where I used to live, every company offering something for people with time on their hands, threw open their doors for business on public holidays. In Britain much is closed and anyway, public transport largely grinds to a halt: the railways are declared to be under engineering works, the buses can only run a ‘holiday’ schedule due to lack of manpower and motorists are offered the chance to experience massive congestion on arterial roads. The great motorways are transformed into car parks, but without the sheer joie de vie commonly associated with parking facilities.

Apparently a great many Brits want to head to the coast because there is nothing like the good old British seaside with pebbly beaches, an array of unappetising eating places and that dread confection called candy floss, valued for its stickiness, vivid pink colour and diabetes-inducing sugar content.

But, as we Brits proudly say, ‘mustn’t grumble’, a phrase uttered as a preface to serial grumbling.

We are a stoic tribe, genetically modified to tolerate inconvenience and disappointment. And yet, defying logic, there are still a great many people who expect better from a bank holiday.

They may even enjoy the kind of holiday ‘live’ music event put on by the pub next door to where I live. It was brave to enlist the services of people who could barely sing, who stuck rigidly to tunes that are played in all the best lifts (elevators) and benefited from being broadcast at full volume so that us hapless neighbours could share the joy.

There are some upsides however; parliament goes into recess for a week so we are spared the latest news of who is stabbing whom. The stock market is also shuttered, so prices cannot be affected by the latest tantrum from the White House, where public holidays are no hindrance to outpourings from the Orange Blob on social media and there is always the grim satisfaction, usually to be had by people in the South of England, as they read horror stories of rain damage in places like Wales, which is somewhere vaguely to the West of the Southern uplands.

Best of all there is always plenty to complain about and we can begin every single complaint with the stirring words, ‘I am not one to complain but…’.

Oh yes, us curmudgeons have a really great time and everyone can draw a breath of relief when the bank holiday ends and there is universal agreement that ‘at least it’s over until next year’.

Hong Kong’s mini-spying base in London

Ben Rogers is an irrepressible human rights advocate and co-founder of the Hong Kong Watch campaign group. He is a mild mannered yet determined British citizen who has been threatened with arrest by the Hong Kong government and has been subject to long standing harassment as he goes about his daily business. In the interests of full disclosure I am happy to state he is also a good friend.

Recently he opened his front door to be confronted by a Chinese woman aggressively thrusting her phone in his face as she snapped pictures of him leaving his house. He, not unreasonably, took this to be another act of intimidation, part of a pattern that includes a stream of threatening messages, making it clear he was under surveillance. His mother has also been threatened, presumably in the hope that she would curb his activities.

This recent act of intimidation came just days after the conviction of two Chinese agents operating out of the Hong Kong and Economic and Trade Office (HKETO) in London who were convicted of working with the Chinese state to spy on British based democracy defenders and intimidate them.

They will soon be sentenced but in the meantime the HKETO continues to enjoy semi-diplomatic status in the UK, despite its illegal activities and despite the reality that Hong Kong is now so entirely under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party that there is no longer a case for granting privileges to this Hong Kong government outpost in London on the pretense that the former British colony retains a shred of autonomy as promised when Britain negotiated the handover of power.

Ben points out that he is far from alone in being subject to China’s transnational repression, as others have suffered far worse treatment. Hongkongers who fled to Britain and have a high profile in the democracy movement have had a ransom put on their heads, available to anyone that dubs them in, presumably to the Chinese Embassy, which will be moving to new premises where it will become the largest foreign mission in Europe.

Democracy protestors have been assaulted by Chinese diplomats in Manchester, the families of dissidents living overseas have been continually harassed and indeed jailed in Hong Kong. Some of the more prominent dissidents have had to take the heartbreaking decision of publicly disassociating themselves from their families in an attempt to relieve the pressure they are facing.

Such is the confidence of immunity that the Chinese dictatorship was, at one stage, establishing police outposts in Britain. It has been infiltrating the Houses of Parliament and engaging in industrial level hacking and cyber interference overseas.

Then there is the matter of association with Triad criminal gangs who have threatened and beaten up political exiles.

The extent of Chinese overseas bullying and surveillance is so widespread as to have compelled democracy activists in the Chinese and Hong Kong diaspora to adopt extensive evasion and security measures to keep themselves safe.

It is frankly shocking that this is reality for British residents who are regarded as enemies of the Chinese dictatorship. This is despite living in a system where rule of law prevails and foreign agents are not supposed to have free reign to intimidate people on British soil.

Britain is armed with powers to curb the activities of foreign agents under the new National Security Law. However, for inexplicable reasons, China has not been included in the enhanced tier of the UK Foreign Influence Registration Scheme, which includes rogue states such as Russia and Iran, despite clear evidence of illicit and highly damaging activity on British soil.

At this level of designation undeclared agents of hostile foreign powers are subject to criminal prosecution.

Equally mysterious is that Britain has failed to follow moves in the United States to shut down the HKETO, or for that matter the Confucious Institutes in many British universities which operate under the control of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department.

Appeasing the Chinese dictatorship on grounds, albeit dubious, of economic benefit to Britain is one thing, tolerating the regime’s thuggery and flagrant illicit activity on British soil should be quite another.

As a diehard believer in democracy it pains me to say that a great many British electors have shown themselves to be deluded by voting for the extreme nationalist Reform Party in the 7 May local elections.

I am well aware that describing voters as deluded, or ignorant, will be seen as both arrogant and offensive.

And it will be seized upon by the enemies of democratic government who argue that it shows that democracy is far from being a panacea.

Both responses miss the point because in a democracy, where freedom of speech prevails, criticizing the outcome of elections is a popular pursuit.

And, as for pathetic argument that democracy is no panacea, it merely sets up an Aunt Sally to knock it down because only cretins believe that a democratic system is a panacea for anything. It is, in the much repeated words of Winston Churchill, ‘the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’.

This is because democracy has a built-in self-correcting capability which works even when democracy results in the election of truly dubious leaders, such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary or someone who is both mad and bad like Liz Truss in Britain. The system ensures that they will be found out and then dislodged. Getting rid of the terrible leaders who preside over autocracies generally only happens after much blood has been spilled.

Things get more complex when a democratically elected leader makes it their business to snuff out the system which put them in office and replace it by an autocracy. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is trying to do this in Turkey, the Orange Blob in the White House would like to do it in the USA and, as we have seen, Mr. Orbán failed to do it Hungary.

The Reform Party has some distance to travel before it is able to try this sort of thing in Britain. As matters stand it is essentially a one man band accompanied by a coalition of serial opportunists, plus some seriously bad and unbelievably stupid people. Because of this they will hopefully find it very difficult to destroy the strong foundations of British democracy and liberty.

Meanwhile we are being treated to bucket loads of why-oh-why hand wringing from the British commentariat in full flight. This is accompanied by serious self-examination within the mainstream political parties, which often amounts to little more than power plays at the highest level. Much of this washes seamlessly over the heads of citizens who have more pressing concerns on their mind.

I however believe that the gathering strength of Reform is a pressing concern and many others share this view, even if we are in a minority.

The way politics generally works is that voters are very clear about what they don’t like and more vague about policies they want to see enacted. Labour stumbled into power fuelled by a massive backlash against the Conservative government. Reform barely owes its success to its plans for Making Britain Great Again or some other nonsense, what mattered was its powerful case for giving the established political order a massive kick up the backside.

In many ways they deserved to be kicked having been shown to be incompetent, inept at even trying to explain themselves and, worst of all, stale, and appearing to want power for the sake of being in power.

I suspect that it will not take that long for the grifters in Reform to be exposed and that the one man band will dissolve into the kind of factionalism which has marked the decline of other parties led by Nigel Farage. Mind you, the infinitely bigger bungling and scandals have in the White House have yet to dent the popularity of an even greater egotist whose adulation among hardcore supporters remains intact.

So, nothing can be taken for granted but I cling to the belief that at the end of the day people are not stupid, or at least not that stupid, so they will come to realise that the easy talk of populists inevitably fails to match up to reality.

Thus the people who voted in their droves for taking Britain out of the European Union, have come to realise that the outcome of Brexit is far from what had been promised and a majority of Brits now want this decision to be reversed. The genius of Mr. Farage, who led the charge for exiting the EU, is to have wriggled out of all responsibility for this state of affairs. It remains to be seen whether he can wriggle out again.

I write this defence of democracy with the experience of having lived most of my adult life in Hong Kong which was progressing towards democracy but never got there, but it did enjoy a high degree of liberty. This has been brutally extinguished by the Chinese Communist Party. The dream that was Hong Kong has been reduced to rubble. Seeing it happen at first hand ensures that I will never glibly reject the benefits of a democratic system even at times when the voters test its strengths to the limit.

Antisemitism has a long and deeply troubling history in Britain and here we are again with violent attacks on Britain’s Jewish community and the best our political leaders can do is to respond with self-indulgent point scoring.

If Britain’s political parties were serious about affirming their solidarity with the Jewish community they would have issued an unequivocal joint statement expressing their unwavering solidarity with British Jews and clear rejection of any form of racism.

A united antisemitic front is required is to make it clear that this form of racism is anathema to all decent people and to clearly signal that its perpetrators are isolated from decent British people.

Instead what we have seen is a political response scouring the sewers in search of ways to score points over opponents.

While prominent members of the Muslim community have been quick to condemn anti-Jewish violence some half-baked supporters of the Palestinian cause have embarrassed themselves with this-is-all-very-bad-but… type apologetics which most people rightly find to be inappropriate at best, while at worst confirming the link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

No wonder the Israeli government, currently composed of extreme nationalists, has gleefully seized on this kind of response and used it as an excuse to insist that anyone disagreeing with their policies is antisemitic and giving succour to the perpetrators of attacks on British Jews. Meanwhile senior Israeli leaders laid out the red carpet for a visit to Israel by Tommy Robnison, Britain’s most prominent racist.

In the immediate aftermath of the stabbing of two Jewish people in Golders Green (and a Muslim man by the same alleged attacker, a complicating factor left out of most reports) a gathering of Jewish protestors at the scene of the attack, confronted the Prime Minister with banners proclaiming: ‘Keir Starmer – Jew Harmer’.

As anyone who has followed this Substack knows, I am far from being a Sir Keir fan, but to accuse him of being a ‘Jew Harmer’ is ludicrous and grossly insulting. He is, if anything, philosemitic, not just because his wife is Jewish but because he vigorously campaigned to expunge antisemitism from the Labour Party.

This wild accusation reflects the anger and frustration of people who have experienced escalating attacks on their community. Instead of focusing their anger on the attackers they appear to have opted for a response that looks suspiciously like the pursuit of a political agenda.

Then there is the elephant in the room, which is the slaughter of civilians in Gaza and the burgeoning death toll in Lebanon. This has led to heightened pressure on Jewish communities around the world with fatal consequences. It has also produced an outpouring of anti-Muslim hysteria.

How can it be that Mr. Cohen going about his business in Golders Green is any more responsible for the situation in Gaza than Mr. Mohammed in Tower Hamlets is responsible for Hamas?

Blaming the victims for being attacked (as rape survivors know only too well) is a vile trope and not mitigated by weasel-type excuses such as accusing Jews who support Israel of sharing responsibility for the excesses of its government.

Meanwhile the self-righteous fury that has surfaced in the face of these racist attacks has led to suggestions that Britain’s much valued traditions of liberty should be abandoned to stop free speech when it involves criticism of Israel. Where criticism of this kind spills into antisemitism, robust laws exist to deal with it and they should be fully used. Similarly there is a clamour to make Britain’s laws explicitly racist by clamping down on Muslim immigration. To succumb to this erosion of British values is to hand victory to the thugs who terrorise the communities that are currently under attack.

Building higher walls are built around Jewish buildings and Mosques is one way of preventing further violence by why should these law abiding communities have to live with this kind of thing?

In the short term greater protection cannot be avoided but in the longer term work needs to be done to isolate the extremists and make them pariahs in our society, while using the law to the fullest extent to put these dangerous people behind bars.

There is much talk of British Jews planning to leave Britain and resettling in Israel, the most dangerous place in the world for Jews to live. It is unarguable that Jews in Israel face infinitely greater dangers than anyone living in areas with a significant Jewish population outside the Jewish state.

I am part of this community, albeit never having been an observant Jew, yet intensely proud of my Jewish tradition. I am not going anywhere and I sincerely hope that other members of the community will not feel the need to flee.

We are the people who (via our Sephardi ancestors) brought fish and chips to Britain, we are deeply embedded in British society.

During the long history of Jewish settlement in Britain antisemitism has been much worse than it is today. My family, like many other Jewish families in the 1930s, decided to change the family name to reduce the prejudice they faced in getting jobs and in a host of other ways. The streets of London’s East End, where my family lived, had become a danger zone for Jews. And casual antisemitism in popular culture and elsewhere was commonplace.

Things have changed for the better and they changed in large part because the antisemites faced the wrath of decent British people who were determined to cut out this cancer not just because it was bad for the Jews but because it was terrible for society as a whole.

They did not wait for leadership from the mainstream political parties but took matters into their own hands. There is a lesson to be learned here.

Sending the King to the United States to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence seems weird on a number of levels, not least because someone seems to have got the date wrong – the anniversary is in July, even I know that.

Other than that, how come the government has the power to tell the British head of state what to do and where to go?

Second, how come the head of state is so compliant?

Third, why on earth should Britain be so keen on celebrating a massive defeat which resulted in the collapse of the colonial enterprise in America?

And fourthly, more pressingly, why after systematic insults about Britain, about its armed forces, about its political leadership and yes, about its windmills, does anyone think it is a great idea to butter up the Raving Orange Buffon in the White House?

Answers to these questions have been supplied but are they convincing?

Obviously the British monarchy is a constitutional monarchy so it does not govern and, by convention, does not use its position to express political views. So the Head of State has to be led by the Head of Government.

Equally obviously Britain has forgiven the pesky Americans for fighting a bloody war ending in defeat for Britain and followed by even more bloody internal wars, as an independent state emerged. Since then the colony across the Atlantic has become infinitely more powerful than the country which once ruled it.

It is in this spirt that the British Prime Minister has decided to ignore all the truly dreadful things the Orange Buffon has to say about him and to continue to be accommodating as possible.

So, it may be argued that this all makes perfect sense, but does it?

In a world where most nations have decided that the head of state should also run the government and in democracies, where governments are formed by a process of the people’s choice, why does Britain cling to this bizarre system of giving the head of state immense prestige but no power?

Sometimes it seems that the royal family is simply the best soap opera in town and owners of the biggest and most outrageous hats. They are even more prone to scandals and rows than the occupants of the fictious Coronation Street, while the alopecia that tragically afflicts the male royals, stubbornly refuses to go away.

Keeping the show on the road is far from cheap, on the contrary taxpayers are paying anything from £130m to £500m per year to keep the royals in business.

The palaces, the parades and the endless honours ceremonies no doubt add to the gaiety of national life but it begs the question of whether a self-perceived modern nation, proud of its democratic tradition, needs all this nonsense.

Should the monarchy disappear we would at least be spared the simpering sycophancy of royal coverage in the media. The motley collection of royal ‘insiders’, royal ‘watchers’ and associated ailments would be out of a job. Normally I am stoutly opposed to sacking journalists but there are exceptions.

That said, the best rebuttal to anyone seeking the end of the monarchy, is to ask whether its replacement would really be any better?

Looking across the Atlantic at the person currently holding the elected head of state position, suggests that we need be very careful what we wish for.

Talking of which, how on earth to deal with this extraordinary man child? Keir Starmer’s grin, bear it and grovel strategy has yielded precisely nothing, even the much vaunted preferential trade deals are crumbling into dust.

Standing up to the bully, as the Spanish government has decided to do, has most certainly got the man child stamping around in truculent fury but has Spain really suffered? Aside from the pathetic suggestion that America, which currently despises NATO, will move to expel Spain from NATO, is idiotic because there is no way of doing this. So, it is hard to see any pain inflicted on Spain for saying no and no again.

Back home the Spanish government has greatly gained in stature from its resolute position and it has both vocal and behind the doors applause from its true allies who are looking at ways of working more closely together.

Britain meanwhile is pulling out all the stops to pat America on the back for defeating King George III in the War of Independence. Acknowledging this big mistake is no bad thing but all the other fawning and clucking is definitely not so. Putting the abuse on hold for the four days of the royal visit can hardly be seen as any kind of success.

Anyway, apparently, the show must go on, or must it?

It is hard to imagine that Donald Trump and Keir Starmer have anything in common but they do and it is not trivial: both of them are dead men walking and they don’t know it.

It may appear to be quite mad to make this comparison between such different personalities but they actually have more in common. Both lead political parties which they don’t particularly like, both of them think that their supporters can be taken for granted as they pander to causes and audiences who are anathema to their core backers and both men are rather arrogant. Obviously Sir Keir, ambitious and self-confident as he is, is not even within spitting distance of the arrogance, ego and self-belief of the man who posts images of himself as Jesus Christ.

That said they give every impression of being utterly convinced that they can get away with their multiple misdeeds. Fortunately they cannot.

The Buffon in the White House, who promised not to get America entangled in endless foreign wars, has now not so much got entangled but sunk into a mire – at the very, very best he can only hope to get back to the status quo before the US/Israeli attack on Iran.

Sir Keith, to be fair, is not serially dishonest like his American counterpart. He is not as greedy or as venal, indeed he only aspired to free suits and glasses as the benefits of office, compared with the billions flowing into the Trump family coffers. And he did, or at least he appeared to have set out with honourable intentions.

Yet, having come into office promising to restore trust and integrity in government, he is now serially entangled with the Mandelson scandal, and is weakened beyond repair.

The not so small matter of who will replace Sir Keir, is, for now, keeping him in place but he and the muppets surrounding him, are alone in thinking that the inevitable will not happen. .

Mind you the alternatives to Sir Keir on the other side of the political divide are also worth contemplating with dread as the options range from terrifying to downright bizarre.

The American President is not so easily removed from office but he faces the prospect of festering in the vulgar golden cage he has built for himself at the White House, venturing more frequently into the Florida sunshine to cheat, as he does, at golf. However he will find that every time he tries to pull a lever to exercise his will, nothing happens. The Mid-term elections will terminally curb his ability to legislate, people who he bullied into submission will start getting off their knees while only the die-hardest of the die hard Mega crowd will continue worshipping at his feet.

The thing about power draining from high office, is it drains vey fast and every trickle rapidly turns into a flood.

Sir Keir came to power armed with a super parliamentary majority, a decent reputation for honesty and every chance to put Britain back on track after a succession of disastrous Tory leaders bit the dust. These enormous advantages were squandered within weeks as Sir Keir’s now departed Svengali Morgan McSweeny instructed him to pander to the extreme right of British politics, make nice with the Orange Buffon and kowtow to the most odious dictatorships (trust me that Xi Jinping, will have Sir Keir for breakfast) while busying himself back home scarring the bejesus out of immigrants, demonising welfare recipients, while giving u-turning a bad name.

The Orange Buffon never set out with good intentions and thinks honour is little more than a tradable commodity, so at least he set the bar low from day one but he did create an impressive coalition of the dispossessed and the ultrarich to get him elected. He had made lavish promise upon lavish promise of what he intended to do and when promise after promise turned to dust, he simply said that black was white and blithely continued lying, as he pounded out increasingly illiterate and mad messages via social media.

Now the party is over. A more cautious person would add some caveats at this point but this old hack has seen how these things work time after time, not just in the UK and the US but elsewhere in the world and I have developed a very acute nose for the stench of doom.

However even I am not deranged enough to pinpoint a time when this process will come to fruition. The tenacity of the doomed is never to be underestimated.

As Abraham Lincoln famously said: ‘you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time’.

Have your heartstrings been pulled by the plight of expatriates living in the Gulf where safe streets and gleaming tower blocks are no longer either as safe or as alluring as they once were?

In the rush to get out some have resorted to private jets, some decided to stay put and are complaining about how the war is making life miserable. Even their human right to having a sunset beverage on the Corniche is now in question.

The glories of life in Dubai, one of the Gulf states has frequently been lauded by Richard Tice, the staunch British patriot and deputy to Nigel Farage in the immigrant bashing Reform Party. Mr Tice is a very frequent visitor to Dubai because his fiancée, the journalist Isabel Oakshott, lives there declaring she is a ‘Labour school fee exile’. Britain has clearly failed her and Mr Tice shares her love of other people paying taxes, not to mention the ‘opportunities’, a word he often uses describing the delights of the Gulf. As he is a Member of Parliament it is really not practical for him to join his family in Dubai – what a pity.

We hear a lot about these self-selected tax dodgers and high earners who love the tax-free policies in the Gulf and marvelled that they could be in a Muslim country and still get a decent Martini, not forgetting access to servants, many of whom are on wages of around $500 per month and then, of course, there are the sunny days, albeit a trifle too sunny for some but air conditioning is plentiful and electricity is ever so cheap.

We hear rather less about the far larger number of expatriates mainly from South and South East Asia who work as labourers, cleaners and in a host of other menial low paid jobs. They have rather more pressing human rights problems.

The Gulf underclass, for that is what they are, have suffered fatalities, not least because many are living in shacks and have no access to safer bomb shelters. Some have been evacuated by their governments but most of them are stuck where they are because of lack of funds.

Bad as these circumstances are, things are far worse for Iranians subject to bombing of civilian targets, Lebanese subject to both displacement and bombing of civilian targets by Israel and indeed Israelis who live in fear of rockets fired from Lebanon by Hezbollah and from Iran itself.

I suppose that the fate of expatriates is rather more relatable, especially white folk who look just like many of us. They are perfectly entitled to move anywhere in the world that will have them but they might have cared to look a little more carefully at how things are run in the Gulf before they got there.

They appear not to have noticed that authoritarian government prevails in all the Gulf states. Human rights are extremely low on the agenda, while full blown discrimination against women is high. So, when the brown stuff hits the fan even expatriates get a taste of reality as some of them are carted off to jail for filming missile attacks on their phones, while others are stopped in the streets by policemen who used to ignore them.

It’s hard to sympathise with their belated realisation that the scramble to avoid paying taxes and enjoy a luxurious lifestyle comes with a price. Among their number are folk who have the cheek to demand that the people who pay taxes in Britain should cough up for their repatriation or at the very least facilitate their departure to another tax haven as they are loath to come back to the frightful UK where you are even taxed for sending your children to elite schools.

Fear not this Substack will soon be launching a collection to help them out. Don’t rush to make a payment just yet because a host of other good causes are also clamouring for attention. The Peter Mandleson Defence Fund has pressing needs and as for the Mounbatten-Windsor Moving Costs Fund, it urgently needs money as the ex-Prince is no friend to the concept of economy, although he has heard it mentioned in relation to somewhere at the back of aeroplanes.

So, hold your horses, ‘help is on the way,’ as Donald Trump promised Iranian anti-regime activists. His promises are every bit as good as anything promised in this little spot.