The Mirror Crack'd

Yesterday, as the world focused on the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestians were streaming back to their destroyed or damaged homes in the north of the Gaza Strip. The images of both events being beamed simultaneously around the globe could hardly have provided a starker or more telling juxtaposition. It wasn't meant to be this way. Under the terms of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas the internally displaced Gazans were due to make their return journey on Sunday. However, when Israeli hostage, Arbel Yehoud, was not released as expected, Israel accused Hamas of violating the agreement and checkpoints to the north remained closed. They opened instead on Monday, releasing the reverse exodus, thus coinciding with Holocaust Memorial Day (officially International Holocaust Remembrance Day). Someone hadn't thought it through - the 'optics', as they say, were not good. I'm sure many will have found th...

On Channel 4 News Trump's biographer, Gwenda Blair, suggested he was now more monarch than president. An intriguing proposition which, if accurate, raises alarming questions as to where the coronation of King Donald I might take America? Not to a good place for sure. What is less clear is how much damage he will wreak until his reign ends, either with his death or deposition. Until now we would have taken some comfort in the fact that the American Constitution limits a president to two terms in office only. But as Trump seems determined to tear up those guiding principles we cannot be certain that, as he hinted during the election campaign when he promised people wouldn't have to vote again, he will remain president for life and rule as an autocrat. If this is truly his intention, and he is sustained in it by enough appointees, senators and congressmen and -women, then it is not hard to see the country descending into bloody civil war. If that happens, Trump will be less George...

Donald Trump will be attending a glittering round of black tie society parties in Washington DC tonight having been sworn in as 47th President of the United States of America in the Rotunda of the Capitol building. The ceremony itself was probably one of the more, if not the most,  bizarre and unsettling events I'm ever likely to witness on live TV. In broadcasts of similar state occasions here - State Openings of Parliament, State Funerals, the Coronation of Charles and Camilla (until today a prime contender for the accolade) etc - the Alice in Wonderland quality induces a sort of torpor. It may all be ludicrous but it will go off impeccably, choreographed to the nth degree, and the music will be perfection. It all serves to lull one into complicity but also complacency - what could possibly go wrong? In the American version we found out precisely what when country music star, Carrie Underwood, came to sing America the Beautiful. After an interminable silence, during whi...

"Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice." So wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian whose opposition to Hitler and Nazism in Germany led to his execution in Berlin, just before the end of the Second World War, in 1945. I suspect, in the second Trump presidential term, we may once again be about to witness an unholy alliance of stupidity and malice, and what that can accomplish when coupled with untrammelled power. Bonhoeffer seems to have approached the phenomenon of human stupidity with appalled fascination. Goodness knows, he was eyewitness to a monstrous example of it! By stupidity ( Dummheit ) he implied not so much mental impairment as a wilful lack of judgment; a deliberate abandonment of good sense, curiosity and morality. As he put it, "The impression we get is less that stupidity is an innate defect than that under certain circumstances people are made stupid or allow themselves to be made stupid."  What makes Bon...

Barely six months into his new government and Sir Keir Starmer is losing ministers at a rate of knots to rival his Tory predecessors. To paraphrase Lady Bracknell, to lose one minister may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness. And it is arguably carelessness - though possibly also naïvety - that lies at the heart of Starmer's travails with his former Transport Secretary, Louise Haigh. To add to his woes, Tulip Siddiq has just resigned as Economic Secretary to the Treasury, a role which included monitoring City curruption. Having referred herself to the PM's standards adviser and received rather less than fulsome support from that quarter, she was left with little choice. In fairness to him, Starmer had to fill a large number of senior government posts in very short order on gaining a landslide majority at the general election on 4 July. He did so knowing of Haigh's spent conviction for fraud, having accepted her assurance that her sentence was gi...

President Elect Donald Trump needs to watch his mouth if he wants a country to be president of after his inauguration. Alongside suggesting annexing the Panama Canal and buying Greenland, Trump posited Canada as the 51st state of the Union. This diplomatic outrage prompted an ironical response from veteran Canadian Green politician, Elizabeth May, who countered that instead California might wish to join Canada, before mentioning the concept of Cascadia. She was only partly joking. 'Cascadia', a vision of the contiguous US Pacific Coastal states of California, Oregon and Washington joining Canada in a liberal coalition has been around for many years - it even has a flag. Since 1992 these states have consistently voted Democrat in US Presidential elections. Pledging “safer streets, strict gun laws and free abortions" she suggested that were the United States to allow the secession of its West Coast it would “get rid of all these states that always vote democrat.” In an upbea...

Essex County Council has voted in favour of cancelling local elections in May in order to concentrate on a major shake-up of local government. The decision comes in response to the government announcing its wish to see fewer councils in England and for each region to have its own elected mayor. In the specific case of Essex, the number of local authorities could be trimmed down from fifteen to as few as two, with a new mayor for the county being voted into office in 2026. As a former London Borough councillor myself I have some misgivings about such centralising plans. In theory, the greatest level of subsidiarity is desirable to encourage grassroots local democracy, working from the parish council level upwards. The reality of that, however, can be cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive.  For example, in my home borough of Tower Hamlets I recall the introduction in 1986 by the incoming SDP/Liberal alliance council (later Lib Dems) of a new decentralising policy of neighbour...

Could 2025 seriously be the year we see a re-litigation of the mediæval Crusades? Perhaps a more accurate analogy than those notorious attempts to regain the Holy Land and Jerusalem for Chistendom would be the Reconquista of al-Andalus. This series of military and cultural campaigns, waged by Europe's Christian kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsular following its conquest by the Umayyad Caliphate, culminated in victory for the Catholic Monarchs of Spain in 1492, bringing to an end eight hundred years of Muslim rule. What prompts this line of thought is the posting of an image on Elon Musk's social media platform, X, that would seem to be urging, in graphic terms, the reconquest of the European part of Istanbul and its Turkish hinterland taken by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1453. Paul Golding, leader of Britain First, put up a doctored photograph of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul with its iconic dome surmounted by a huge Greek flag and surrounded by Greek soldiers. Above the image is ...

It won't be, according to new research just published by Clarion, the UK’s largest housing association. Its findings suggest its future residents will be older, lonelier, in worse health and financially poorer. Why do I not find that hard to believe? As a pensioner having already lost his winter fuel payment of £200 I'm disinclined to be optimistic about the future. While the government seeks to reassure me that my pension will increase in April due to the triple lock I still have to navigate possibly one of the coldest winters in recent times with a 1.2% energy price cap rise in place for this quarter. Added to this, I have also recently been migrated from legacy benefits onto Universal Credit (UC) as one half of what the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) defines as a 'mixed-age couple'. At the same time as I am deemed ineligible for Pension Credit due to slightly exceeding the income threshold I have lost my NHS Credit for new glasses prescriptions and dental tre...