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OPINION: Is A Purged Conservative Party More Electable?

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Part two of a two part article analysing Conservatism in the U.K. in the medium term.

There is a quietly growing temptation within Conservative circles to believe that renewal might come not through unity, but through separation. Let the hard right go, the thinking runs. Let the most ideologically driven MPs, the culture-war entrepreneurs and permanent insurgents, drift over to Reform. Once they are gone, the Conservative Party can finally stop arguing with itself and start sounding like a government again.

In this version of events, Reform ends up holding the baby. All the anger, all the absolutism, all the promises that only work so long as nobody has to implement them. The Conservatives, relieved of the need to placate a faction that thrives on opposition, are left with something closer to a centre-right governing party. Sober, technocratic, mildly unexciting. In other words, electable.

It is an attractive theory. It also carries far more risk than many of its advocates are willing to admit.

The case for letting the far right peel away is rooted in the damage the Conservative brand has suffered over the past decade. This is no longer simply about policy disagreement. It is about credibility. After fourteen years in office, the party is widely seen as chaotic, emotionally volatile and prone to promising things it knows it cannot deliver. Much of that impression has been reinforced by a wing of the party that treats compromise as weakness and governing constraints as proof of betrayal.

Remove that faction and something important changes. A Conservative Party no longer constantly looking over its shoulder could talk about the economy without indulging in unfunded tax fantasies. It could talk about immigration without theatrical cruelty or legal brinkmanship. It could stop flirting with withdrawal from international frameworks it has no realistic intention of leaving, and start presenting itself once more as a steward of institutions rather than their sworn enemy.

That kind of party would not excite. But it might begin, slowly, to rebuild trust.

The assumption underpinning this strategy is that Reform, emboldened by defecting MPs, would ultimately be exposed by proximity to responsibility. Protest parties flourish in opposition because they are never forced to reconcile slogans with consequences. Give Reform a parliamentary cohort with ministerial experience and suddenly the questions become unavoidable. How is this paid for? What happens when policy collides with the courts? How does Britain function the morning after the rhetoric ends?

In theory, Reform ends up louder but thinner, its appeal dulled by the realities of power. The Conservatives, meanwhile, recover their sense of seriousness.

The difficulty is that British elections are not won on theory. They are won under a first-past-the-post system that is unforgiving of fractured coalitions. The Conservative Party has never succeeded by being universally admired. It has succeeded by being the default option for a broad and often uneasy alliance of voters who see it as the least risky vehicle for government.

Split that alliance and the consequences are brutal. A centre-right Conservative Party polling in the mid-twenties might be more respectable than the version voters have rejected. It might even be quietly welcomed back into polite society. Under the electoral system, it would still lose heavily if Reform were taking a significant share of the vote in the same seats. Respectability does not translate into majorities. Arithmetic still matters.

This is where historical comparisons begin to mislead. There is a fond tendency to invoke the John Major era, a time when Conservatism felt quieter, less performative, more managerial. But Major governed at the end of a long period of Conservative dominance, with a Labour opposition still struggling to persuade voters it was ready for office. Neil Kinnock never governed, and by the time Labour finally won, it did so having reshaped itself almost beyond recognition.

A modern centre-right Conservative Party would be rebuilding from opposition in a far harsher environment. Labour today is not tentatively approaching power but settling into it. The media landscape is faster, angrier and less forgiving. The right is not unified but splintered, with Reform positioned not as a temporary irritant but as a permanent rival.

Competence alone will not be enough to overcome that. It may be necessary, but it is not sufficient.

Where a renewed Conservative Party could make genuine progress is not immediately at the ballot box, but in the public imagination. At present, many voters do not feel permitted to vote Conservative, even if they share some of its instincts. The party feels exhausting. Unstable. Locked in arguments that have little to do with their lives.

‘A post-exodus Conservative Party that quietly abandons legal grandstanding, accepts the basic architecture of the state, and speaks honestly about trade-offs would begin to change that perception. Slowly, it could restore the idea that voting Conservative is a responsible choice rather than an act of frustration.‘

But this is a long process. It requires a leader who looks credible rather than transitional. It requires policies designed to work rather than to signal. It requires, above all, time in opposition that is used productively rather than resentfully.

The greatest risk is that Reform does not implode on schedule. It may not collapse under the weight of responsibility. It may instead harden into a durable political identity, one that no longer sees itself as a protest but as a cause. At that point, the right does not realign. It divides permanently, leaving the Conservatives facing a choice between accommodation and irrelevance.

So could a renewed centre-right Conservative Party thrive after a far-right exodus, leaving Reform holding the baby? Eventually, perhaps. But not quickly, and not without pain.

Letting Reform take responsibility may expose its limitations. It may also entrench a split that keeps Labour in power for a generation. Renewal, if it comes, will be slow, disciplined and unglamorous. It will require the Conservatives to accept a deeply unfashionable truth.

Growing up in politics often means losing first, and learning while others govern. The question is whether the party has the patience, and the nerve, to endure that process rather than reach again for the comfort of noise.

OPINION: Reform And The Politics Of Absolution

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Can Reform’s promise of a clean sweep of politics withstand the adoption of ex-Conservatives with ‘form’? Part one of a two part article considering Conservatism in the U.K. in the medium term.

There is a comforting fiction in British politics that collapse can be cured by costume change. When a party has governed badly for long enough, when the slogans curdle and the faces harden, the solution is not reckoning but relaunch. New name, new logo, new promise of authenticity. The country, weary and overstretched, is invited to believe that this time the people responsible for the mess have seen the light. History suggests otherwise.

Reform sells itself as rupture. It trades on the language of outsiders, of broken systems, of a political class that has failed and must be swept aside. It speaks fluently to a public mood shaped by falling living standards, collapsing public services and the sense that politics has become an exercise in self preservation rather than public good. This is not a marginal complaint. It is the defining economic and cultural experience of the past decade and a half. Reform’s appeal rests on the claim that it stands apart from that record, that it represents something clean, unsullied and impatient with the habits of Westminster.

That claim becomes harder to sustain the moment Conservative MPs are welcomed through the door.

The problem is not moral purity. Politics is not a monastery and experience is not a sin. The problem is narrative credibility. You cannot plausibly run as the antidote to fourteen years of Conservative economic mismanagement while recruiting people who voted for it, defended it and remained loyal to it long after its failures were obvious and cumulative. Voters may be cynical, but they are not amnesiac. They know who was in the room.

There is a sleight of hand at work here that British politics has become dangerously comfortable with. Failure is treated as a collective fog rather than a series of choices. Responsibility dissolves once a rosette is removed. The same politician who defended austerity, waved through Brexit without a delivery plan, nodded along as public investment withered and stood silent during the Truss episode is reborn overnight as a truth teller who was somehow trapped inside the wrong organisation. It is a politics of absolution without confession.

Reform’s defenders argue that these defectors were never really Conservatives in spirit, that they were marginalised or ignored, that the party left them rather than the other way round. This is a convenient story, but it collapses under even light scrutiny. Politics is not therapy. If you sit on the government benches, vote with the whip and enjoy the privileges of office, you own the outcomes. You do not get to claim outsider status simply because the building later caught fire.

What makes this more than a branding problem is the economic context. The damage of the past fourteen years is not abstract. It is felt in mortgage statements, in tax bills, in the visible decay of public space. Britain is poorer relative to its peers than it was, less confident, more tightly wound. Any party promising renewal has to reckon with that record honestly. Reform has instead chosen to blur it.

There is a cold tactical logic behind the decision. First past the post is brutal to insurgents. MPs bring procedural knowledge, media oxygen and local infrastructure. A party made entirely of political novices risks looking unserious, especially to voters who want competence as much as anger. From that perspective, defectors are not ideological converts but useful tools, proof that Reform is no longer just a protest but a parliamentary force.

‘The risk is that in trying to look serious, Reform ends up looking familiar.‘

This is where the Farage paradox becomes acute. Farage’s political strength has always rested on distance. He flourishes as a commentator on failure, not as its custodian. His gift is to articulate discontent from the outside, to channel grievance without owning the consequences of power. That posture weakens the moment his party fills up with people who very much owned things. The outsider myth frays when the insiders arrive carrying their voting records.

There is also a deeper identity problem that Reform has not resolved. Insurgent movements and replacement parties are not the same thing. Insurgents exist to destabilise, to force issues onto the agenda, to break taboos. Replacement parties inherit the system, its rules, its compromises and its moral baggage. Reform is trying to be both at once. It wants the electricity of revolt and the respectability of office. It wants to burn down the old house while quietly moving the furniture in next door.

‘British political history is littered with movements that failed at this exact point. They mistook anger for consent and novelty for absolution. They discovered too late that voters will forgive inexperience more readily than they forgive complicity. A fresh face can learn. A familiar one has already had their chance.‘

The most dangerous assumption Reform makes is that disillusioned voters are shopping only for tone. That they want someone to say the right things loudly enough and that the backstory is secondary. In reality, economic decline sharpens moral judgement. When people feel poorer, they become less tolerant of narrative tricks. They ask simpler questions. Where were you when this happened. What did you vote for. Why did you stay.

Reform could, in theory, confront this head on. It could set clear conditions for entry, demand public reckonings, draw hard lines between those who resisted and those who acquiesced. It could articulate structural reasons why it would not repeat Conservative failure rather than relying on vibes and volume. It has not done so. Instead, it has opted for absorption and hope.

The danger is not just that voters will see through it. The danger is that Reform slowly becomes what it claims to oppose, a vessel for recycled careers, a shelter for politicians seeking moral laundering rather than renewal. At that point the promise of change collapses into something more familiar and more depressing, the idea that British politics is an endless loop of the same people failing under different banners.

In the end, voters will make a judgement less ideological than Reform expects. They will not pore over manifestos or factional histories. They will look at faces and ask whether this feels like escape or continuation. If the answer is continuation, no amount of rhetoric about refreshment will save it. A system does not renew itself by rehiring its own authors and asking the public to pretend they are new.

OPINION: Almost Famous, The Phenomenon Of Coming Second

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Inspired by the research and writing of Malcolm Gladwell, thoughts on artists who fail in talent shows but go on to earn greater success than the winner.


Jessie Buckley, talent television, and the quiet power of coming second

In 2009, a young Irish performer named Jessie Buckley appeared on a BBC talent show called I’d Do Anything?. Each week, millions watched as contestants sang, acted, survived eliminations, and edged closer to a single prize. The winner would be cast as Nancy in Oliver! in the West End. The logic of the programme was simple and reassuring. One person would win. Everyone else would lose.

Buckley came second.

Fast forward sixteen years and Buckley has just won a Golden Globe Award for her acting. The obvious question is why. Why does someone who did not win the contest so often end up winning the career? Why does second place, which looks like failure in the moment, turn out to be such a powerful position in retrospect?

To answer that, we need to rethink what talent shows are actually measuring.

Talent competitions are designed to reward immediacy. They favour people who can peak quickly, who read clearly on screen, who can be understood by an audience in under thirty seconds. This is not a flaw. It is simply the nature of television. The problem comes when we confuse success in that environment with success everywhere else.

Real careers are not built on immediacy. They are built on accumulation.

Psychologists who study near misses have found something counterintuitive. People who almost win often remain more motivated than those who actually do. The winner experiences closure. The runner-up experiences possibility. There is a lingering sense that something remains unfinished, and that sense can be galvanising.

Buckley left I’d Do Anything? with public recognition but without resolution. She was known, but not defined. That distinction matters. Winners of talent shows tend to be frozen in the image that helped them win. The audience voted for a specific version of them, and the industry is reluctant to let that version change. Runners-up, by contrast, are unfinished drafts. They are allowed to evolve.

There is also the matter of constraint. Winning brings certainty, and certainty brings restriction. Contracts are signed. Expectations are set. Momentum must be maintained at all costs. Coming second removes that pressure. It creates a rare and valuable condition. Time.

Time is the hidden variable in most success stories. Buckley had time to train, to take roles that were not obvious, to move between theatre, television, and film without being forced into a single lane. She was not required to justify her presence every six months with a new, louder performance. She could get better quietly.

If you look closely at her career, a pattern emerges. She gravitates towards complexity. Characters that resist easy sympathy. Stories that sit slightly askew. These are not choices that play well in mass-audience competitions, but they are precisely the choices that compound over time. Each role builds on the last, deepening her reputation rather than broadening it.

This points to a larger truth about how we misunderstand success. We assume that the best path is the most direct one. Win early. Be obvious. Eliminate uncertainty. But in many fields, especially creative ones, the opposite is true. Uncertainty creates room for experimentation. Experimentation leads to originality. Originality is what lasts.

The British cultural context matters here too. There is a long tradition of distrusting instant coronations. We are comfortable with the slow burn, the actor who arrives sideways, the sense that credibility must be earned gradually. Buckley’s trajectory fits that pattern perfectly. She did not announce herself as a finished product. She became one.

Seen this way, her Golden Globe does not redeem a loss. It confirms a process. Coming second was not a setback. It was a structural advantage.

Winning a talent show is a moment. Coming second can be a career. The lesson is not that failure is good, or that success is overrated. It is that the conditions under which we succeed matter as much as success itself. Sometimes the best thing that can happen to you is to finish just short of the finish line, with enough attention to open doors and enough freedom to choose which ones to walk through.

Almost, it turns out, is often exactly where you need to be.

CURRENT AFFAIRS: USA Rogue State? Part 2

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Following the events of January 3rd a continuation piece from my article USA Rogue State? February 2025.

USA: Rogue State? (Part 2) – A New Precedent

The great conflicts of our time still loom. Ukraine grinds on, the Baltic states remain taut, and Taiwan sits under permanent pressure. Yet America’s sudden strike on Venezuela suggests something else is shifting first: the way power is exercised, and the ease with which it is now justified.

The world has not tipped into open war. Not yet.

Ukraine grinds on. The Baltic states remain tense but intact. The Taiwan Strait is still defined more by naval choreography than gunfire. The much-trailed great-power collisions remain, for now, on the horizon. But something else has moved, quieter perhaps, and more corrosive.

The overnight American strike on Venezuela, unilateral and justified after the fact, is not the opening act of global conflict. It is something subtler and potentially more dangerous: a precedent in search of a doctrine.

Washington insists this was exceptional. A sui generis response to criminality, corruption and national collapse. That argument would be more persuasive were it not the standard preamble to almost every intervention of the past three decades. Exceptionalism, after all, has form.

What unsettles is not simply that the United States acted, but how easily it did so, and how thin the legal and diplomatic scaffolding appeared to be. There was no UN mandate. No coalition patiently assembled. No serious attempt to clothe the operation in the rituals of multilateral consent. This was not Iraq redux. There was no effort to persuade the world. There was merely an announcement that it had been done.

For America’s adversaries, this is not hypocrisy newly discovered. Moscow and Beijing have long dismissed the so-called rules-based order as a euphemism for American latitude. But the Venezuelan operation offers them something more useful than rhetoric. Evidence.

Russia, already at war in Europe, will draw a bitter but clarifying lesson. Allies, however loyal, are expendable when they cease to be useful or defensible. Venezuela was a geopolitical bauble: oil-rich, symbolically defiant, but strategically indefensible from Moscow’s perspective. Its removal does not weaken Russia militarily, but it further narrows the map of places where Russian power can plausibly shelter its friends.

This matters not because Venezuela was ever decisive to Russia’s fortunes, but because it represented something Moscow increasingly lacks: the ability to project influence beyond its immediate neighbourhood. One by one, those outposts are disappearing. The loss tightens Russia’s isolation at precisely the moment it can least afford it.

China’s calculation is quieter, but potentially more consequential.

Beijing does not depend on Venezuelan oil to function. It has diversified too carefully for that. But Venezuela has been useful precisely because it lay outside American influence, a supplier insulated from Washington’s leverage, sanctions and electoral mood swings. Energy security is not merely about volume. It is about options.

A Venezuela governed from Washington, or by a government whose survival depends upon Washington, removes one of those options. Oil that once flowed eastward under long-term arrangements may now be repriced, redirected, or simply discouraged. No announcement is required. Markets, like diplomats, understand power when they see it.

None of this proves motive. It does not need to. Geopolitics rarely operates on confession. The point is consequence. The removal of Maduro does not merely tidy up a regional problem. It reshapes the strategic environment in which Russia and China already feel increasingly hemmed in.

For the Baltic states, the lesson is more ambiguous. On the one hand, the operation demonstrates that American power remains overwhelming and decisively usable. On the other, it underlines an uncomfortable truth: US force is increasingly discretionary. It is deployed where Washington wills, not where treaties alone demand. Deterrence depends not only on capability, but on predictability, and predictability is precisely what has been weakened.

China, watching from Beijing, will be less interested in Venezuela itself than in the method. Taiwan is not Caracas. The military, economic and reputational costs of a move across the Strait are of a different order altogether. But the Venezuelan strike sharpens two competing instincts within Chinese strategic thinking.

The first is urgency: act before American resolve hardens further. The second is caution: note how swiftly international opinion curdles when sovereignty is breached without consent.

Beijing’s preferred posture remains pressure without ignition. Encirclement without invasion. Venezuela does not alter that calculus overnight, but it adds a volatile data point to an already unstable equation.

What Ukraine, the Baltics and Taiwan share is that they are already priced into global risk. Markets, militaries and ministries have learned to live with them. Venezuela was different precisely because it was unexpected. It did not emerge from slow escalation or a frozen conflict thawing. It arrived fully formed, announced as fait accompli.

This is why the episode matters beyond Latin America. It suggests a United States increasingly comfortable with post-hoc justification, less concerned with international buy-in, and more willing to test how far its power can be exercised before resistance coheres. That is not rogue behaviour in the cartoon sense, but it is a form of strategic unilateralism that corrodes the very norms Washington claims to uphold.

Supporters will argue that the outcome justifies the method. That a malign regime has been removed. That oil markets will stabilise. That a long-suffering population may yet glimpse reform. All of this may prove true. But outcomes do not erase precedents. They entrench them.

The question, then, is not whether America is a rogue state. The term remains too blunt, too loaded, too performative. The better question is whether the United States is becoming a situational state, one that applies law, restraint and multilateralism when convenient, and dispenses with them when speed or advantage beckons.

History suggests this is not a sustainable posture. Empires can ignore rules only while they write them. The moment others begin to improvise in response, the system fractures.

The great conflicts remain on the horizon. But Venezuela reminds us that the road towards them may not be paved with grand confrontations or red-line speeches. It may instead be littered with smaller, sharper acts, each justified, each exceptional, each making the next one easier.

And that, more than any tank column or missile test, is what should give us pause.

Next. Will a rogue USA look North?

Venezuela will not be the template. It will be the permission. Once permission is granted, the question is no longer where America will act next, but how those closest in Canada and Greenland will recognise the moment when alignment begins to feel like absorption. In his peculiar way Trump has asked nicely, we are beginning to see that this USA will simply take what doesn’t capitulate easily.

COMMENTARY: The Conscience Of Generations

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From the trenches of Spain to TikTok activism: How each generation finds its own way to fight injustice. I take a look at what defines moral courage across nearly a century of activism.

The photographs are fading now, fresh faces, serious beneath berets, holding rifles they barely knew how to use – ‘but if they could shoot rabbits they could shoot fascists’. They were clerks and miners, teachers and labourers, probably born around the time of World War One and united by nothing more than a conviction that fascism had to be stopped. In the winter of 1936, they kissed their wives and girlfriends goodbye at Victoria Station and caught the boat train to Paris, then walked across the Pyrenees to join a war that wasn’t theirs.

Ninety years later, their grandchildren are hunched over smartphones and laptops, typing furiously. Organising boycotts of Israeli goods, coordinating with activists in Manchester and Glasgow through encrypted messaging apps. Their enemy is different, their methods transformed, but the impulse, that peculiar British inability to mind one’s own business when faced with injustice, remains precisely the same.

This is the paradox of moral courage: it appears constant across generations, yet manifests in forms so different that each age struggles to recognise virtue in its predecessors or descendants. The young man boarding the train to Spain in 1937 and the student sharing TikTok videos about Gaza today are separated by everything except the essential thing: the refusal to be a bystander.

The Weight of History

The Spain volunteers were products of their time in ways they barely understood. They had grown up on tales of The Great War, that ghastly demonstration of what happened when good men did nothing whilst imperialism organised itself a war machine prepared to send tens of thousands to their deaths for twenty yards of Flanders. The unemployment queues of the twenties and thirties had given them first-hand experience of how political decisions destroyed ordinary lives. When Hitler began his march across Europe, they possessed a clarity of vision that seems almost enviable today.

It was a simple decision, Fascism was visibly, unmistakably evil. The choice was binary: fight or surrender civilisation itself.

Their media diet reinforced this clarity. The Left Book Club, founded by Victor Gollancz in 1936, distributed serious political analysis to tens of thousands of subscribers. These weren’t soundbites or slogans, but hefty volumes that provided comprehensive frameworks for understanding the world. Members read Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier” and Edgar Snow’s “Red Star Over China” with the same intensity that previous generations had reserved for scripture.

The Communist Party of Great Britain, despite its relatively small membership, provided intellectual structure for much of the anti-fascist movement. Party members attended evening classes in Marxist theory, studied the writings of Lenin and Stalin, and engaged in lengthy debates about the contradictions and solutions dialectical materialism. It was serious, systematic, and utterly certain of its moral foundation.

This certainty came at a cost. The volunteers who returned from Spain, barely half of those who went, found themselves isolated in a society that preferred to forget their sacrifice. The government had banned participation; employers dismissed them as troublemakers; families often disowned them. They had acted on their convictions and paid the price.

The Television Generation

By the 1960s, everything had changed. Television brought warfare into British sitting rooms with an immediacy that print could never achieve. The Vietnam War, though fought 8,000 miles away, became as real as the evening news. Young people watched napalm falling on villages and made their moral calculations accordingly.

But television also fragmented attention. The Spain volunteers had spent years preparing for their moment of choice, reading widely and thinking deeply. The sixties activist might encounter a crisis on Tuesday evening news and be marching against it by Saturday afternoon. The intensity was different, more diffuse but potentially more democratic.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament demonstrated this new model perfectly. Founded in 1958, it brought together people across traditional political divides, vicars and communists, housewives and students, united by a single issue rather than a comprehensive ideology. The annual march from Aldershot to London became a ritual of moral witness, drawing tens of thousands who might never have joined a political party.

“We weren’t trying to overthrow capitalism,” recalls Canon John Collins, an English-American priest, activist, and one of CND’s founders. “We were simply trying to prevent the incineration of humanity. It was a more modest ambition, but in its way equally urgent.”

The anti-apartheid movement perfected this approach over the following decades. Beginning in the early sixties, it combined traditional tactics, boycotts, protests, lobbying, with innovative approaches that made distant injustice personal and immediate. The boycott of South African goods meant that every shopping trip became a political choice. The campaign against sporting contacts meant that cricket and rugby matches became sites of moral conflict.

This movement also pioneered the use of celebrity endorsement. The 1988 Wembley Stadium tribute concert for Nelson Mandela reached a global audience of 600 million people, using entertainment to advance political goals. It was a technique that would become standard practice for later campaigns, but still revolutionary at the time.

The Digital Natives

Walk through any university campus today and you’ll find young people who carry the world’s suffering in their pockets. Their iPhones buzz with updates from Gaza, Myanmar, and Ukraine. They receive real-time footage of air strikes and refugee camps, police violence and peaceful protests. The question is not whether they know about global injustice, they’re drowning in it, but how they can possibly respond to such overwhelming information.

Previous generations had the luxury of ignorance, today’s students know more about global crises than foreign correspondents did thirty years ago. But knowledge without power can be paralysing.

The response has been to develop new forms of engagement that previous generations struggle to recognise as political action. Hashtag campaigns can generate millions of posts within hours. Online fundraising ‘crowdfunding’ can raise substantial sums for distant causes. Viral videos can shift public opinion more rapidly than years of traditional campaigning.

The #MeToo movement demonstrated the power of these new tools. Beginning with a simple hashtag, it created a global conversation about sexual harassment that achieved swift legislative changes and cultural shifts across dozens of countries. The climate activism organised through social media has brought millions of young people onto the streets in coordinated global protests.

Yet digital activism faces unique challenges. The rapid news cycle means that even severe crises can replaced in the news and disappear from public attention within days. This can be manipulated by senior management of media organisations in favour of their own political affiliations. The personalisation of social media means that activists often speak primarily to those who already agree with them – an echo chamber. The volume of information can lead to compassion fatigue, where audiences become numb to repeated exposure to suffering – it becomes less painful to scroll on by.

The Palestine Question

Nothing illustrates these challenges more clearly than contemporary activism around Palestine and specifically Gaza. Social media platforms enable rapid sharing of information and imagery from the territory, creating immediate and highly emotional connections between British audiences and distant suffering. Young people encounter footage of destroyed homes and dead or severely injured women and children with an immediacy that traditional media could never achieve. Traditional media older generations might recognise is perpetually behind the curve now.

The movement has achieved remarkable success in shifting public opinion, particularly among younger demographics. Polls consistently show that 18-34 year olds are more likely to support Palestinian rights than their parents’ or grandparent’s generation. This shift has occurred largely through peer-to-peer education disseminated via social media platforms.

Digital tools have also enabled new forms of economic pressure. Some activist movements use apps to help consumers identify targeted products, whilst campaigns against particular companies can generate thousands of emails and social media posts within hours. University students have occupied buildings and demanded divestment from Israeli companies, echoing the tactics used against apartheid South Africa – specifically contra to government policy causing an authoritarian shift in the rules around assembly and organising protest.

But the digital nature of much contemporary activism also creates vulnerabilities. Online harassment can be severe and persistent. Employers increasingly monitor social media activity. The Israeli (also Russian and Chinese) government has developed sophisticated techniques for countering digital campaigns, including the use of artificial intelligence to generate pro-Israeli content. Just this week the Israeli-supporting US Government has severely sanctioned Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, a pro bono lawyer employed officially by the United Nations to report on the abuse of human rights and contraventions of international law. The contradiction is stark, they host an internationally wanted world leader while sanctioning a person working for free trying to protect innocent civilians. This is not unique to modern democracies, the UK proscribes civil disobedience organisations, both human rights and climate, arresting peacefully protesting grandmothers while simultaneously hosting murderous former ISIS leaders. Geopolitics, hard and soft power work in mysterious ways.

The surveillance tools are more powerful as are the forces arrayed against change. Young activists today face surveillance and repression that previous generations couldn’t imagine.

The Persistence of Conscience

Despite these challenges, certain constants persist across generations. Each era produces individuals willing to sacrifice personal comfort for abstract principles. The 1930s volunteer who risked death in Spain, the 1980s activist who spent weekends outside the South African embassy, and the contemporary campaigner who faces online harassment for posting about Gaza all demonstrate the same fundamental impulse: the refusal to remain passive in the face of injustice.

The forms of engagement have multiplied rather than simply evolved. Today’s most effective activists often combine traditional tactics with digital tools. They might use social media to organise, but still attend physical protests. They might share information online, but also donate money and contact elected representatives.

Take Greta Thunberg, who began her climate activism with the most traditional gesture imaginable, a solitary protest outside the Swedish parliament. Yet her message spread globally through social media, inspiring millions of young people to stage their own protests. The combination of personal witness and digital amplification created a movement that achieved more in two years than traditional environmental groups had managed in decades. The cost to her personally, years of targeted abuse and harassment as she expands her activism from climate to human rights – recently her own courage and fame protecting those around her.

The Measure of Moral Courage

The temptation is always to romanticise past forms of engagement whilst dismissing contemporary ones. The Spain volunteers have achieved heroic status in progressive mythology, whilst today’s digital activists are often dismissed as “slacktivists” who mistake online participation for real engagement.

This misses the essential point. The British volunteers to Spain were no more inherently virtuous than today’s activists; they simply operated within different constraints and opportunities. They faced a clear enemy at a time when physical courage was the obvious response. Today’s activists face more widespread threats in a world where information warfare is often more important than physical confrontation.

The measure of any generation’s moral response to international crises should not be whether they replicate the actions of their predecessors, but whether they fully utilise the tools and opportunities available to them. By this standard, contemporary British activism, from the climate movement to international solidarity campaigns, demonstrates both the persistence of moral concern and the creativity required to address global challenges in an interconnected world.

The man who walked across the Pyrenees to fight fascism and the student who organises boycotts through Instagram are part of the same tradition. They have recognised that injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere, and they have refused to be bystanders. The methods change, but the conscience remains constant.

Perhaps that is enough. Perhaps that is everything.

PS. If you are reading in the U.K. I suggest switching to Channel 4 News.

CURRENT AFFAIRS: America’s Reserve Currency Status Anxiety

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How Trump’s Trade Wars Threaten the US Dollar’s Global Crown

Since the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1945, the American dollar has reigned supreme in global finance. Like a trusted old friend, it has been welcomed across trading floors from Tokyo to London, from Sydney to São Paulo. Yet this remarkable privilege, often taken for granted in Washington’s corridors of power, now faces an existential challenge that few Americans properly comprehend.

When foreign manufacturers ship their trainers, televisions and trinkets to American shores, they collect dollar payments that subsequently flow through the veins of the global economy. These greenbacks grease the wheels of international commerce, particularly in vital commodities markets where oil, wheat and metals trade exclusively in Uncle Sam’s currency. The arrangement has served America handsomely, with foreigners regularly returning these dollars to purchase US Treasury bonds, effectively financing American government spending at bargain-basement interest rates.

This seemingly magical arrangement comes with a seldom-discussed requirement: America must run persistent trade deficits. Far from being an economic weakness, as populist politicians frequently claim, these deficits actually supply the world with the dollars it needs to conduct international trade. It’s a peculiar financial alchemy that transforms America’s appetite for imports into global financial influence.

The dollar’s supremacy isn’t merely about national pride, it’s the foundation of America’s financial advantage. When foreigners willingly hold dollars and dollar-denominated assets, they’re essentially providing interest-free loans to the American economy.

Yet this delicate system faces mounting pressure. The recent American embrace of punitive tariffs against major trading partners resembles nothing so much as a game of financial Russian roulette. As global commerce redirects away from American markets, the circulation of dollars naturally diminishes. Foreign exporters, holding fewer greenbacks, subsequently purchase fewer Treasury bonds.

The consequences quickly cascade. To attract sufficient buyers for its debt, the US Treasury must offer more generous returns, pushing interest rates upward across the American economy. Mortgages grow more expensive, corporate borrowing costs soar, and consumers face steeper credit card bills. Meanwhile, the American government’s interest payments balloon, exacerbating already troublesome budget deficits.

What many fail to grasp is that the dollar’s global status isn’t guaranteed by divine right, it depends entirely on the confidence of individuals and institutions worldwide, confidence that appears increasingly fragile.

Historical precedent offers little comfort. Reserve currency status, once lost, proves devilishly difficult to reclaim. The British pound’s agonising descent from global prominence after World War II provides a cautionary tale that American policymakers would be wise to heed.

Perhaps most concerning, America’s financial system operates with remarkably slim margins of safety. A Swiss watch requires a screwdriver not a hammer. The federal government’s debt has swollen to unprecedented levels, while interest payments consume an ever-larger portion of tax revenues. In this precarious context, preserving the dollar’s international standing isn’t merely a matter of prestige, it’s essential for America’s financial survival.

As spring sunshine bathes Washington’s cherry blossoms, America’s financial future hangs in the balance. Nobody but Trump and his team know if this is just a lull in the storm, or the strong arm tactics of Asia-Pacific countries and Canada selling US Treasury Bonds has given them the shock they require to back off this tough and misguided tariff policy? Do they fully appreciate the gravity of what’s at stake. For a nation accustomed to dollar dominance, the adjustment to a multipolar currency world or a pretender to the currency crown would prove jarring indeed.

See also, USA Rogue State and The Great Crypto For Gold Heist.

#GlobalFinance #DollarDominance #TradePolicy #ThinkTank #EconomicOutlook #InternationalTrade #FinancialMarkets

CURRENT AFFAIRS: USA Rogue State?

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What If The United States Became a Rogue State? Should Great Britain Be Worried?

Let me be clear: I’m not engaging in hyperbole when I pose this question. As we witness the unfolding transformation of American governance under the restored Trump presidency, the international community faces an unprecedented dilemma. The special relationship between Britain and America – long the cornerstone of global democratic stability – now presents us with profound challenges.

The Project 2025 blueprint, meticulously prepared during Trump’s hiatus from power, reads less like a traditional transition plan and more like a manifesto for institutional demolition. Its architects have made no secret of their intentions: the systematic dismantling of what they term the “deep state” – in reality, the very bureaucratic safeguards that have long prevented executive overreach.

Consider the appointments. The installation of loyalists across federal agencies isn’t merely standard political patronage; it represents a fundamental restructuring of American governance. Career civil servants, those repositories of institutional knowledge and regulatory expertise, are being replaced by individuals whose primary qualification appears to be unwavering personal fealty to the president.

The consequences for Britain’s defence and security infrastructure are particularly alarming. Our military doctrine, built upon decades of joint operations and shared intelligence, suddenly stands on unstable ground. The Five Eyes intelligence-sharing agreement – arguably the most sophisticated multilateral intelligence arrangement in history – faces unprecedented strain. American intelligence agencies, now under explicitly political leadership, have already begun restricting certain intelligence flows, citing “national security reorganisation priorities.”

Consider the implications for our armed forces. Joint military exercises, long the backbone of NATO interoperability, are being cancelled or dramatically scaled back. British commanders report increasing difficulty in coordinating with their American counterparts, many of whom have been replaced by political appointees with limited military experience. The integrated defence systems that protect our shores – many reliant on American technology and real-time data sharing – face potential compromises in their effectiveness.

The economic ramifications are equally concerning. The City of London, which has thrived on its role as a crucial hub for dollar-denominated transactions, faces new uncertainties. American financial regulators, now operating under a “America First” directive, have begun implementing measures that effectively discriminate against foreign financial institutions, including British ones. The pound sterling’s traditional correlation with the dollar has become a liability rather than a stability mechanism.

Our defence industry, deeply integrated with American suppliers and technologies, faces severe disruption. Critical components for everything from our nuclear deterrent to our cyber-defence systems rely on American cooperation. The new administration’s “domestic preference” policies threaten to sever supply chains that have taken decades to build. British defence manufacturers, who have invested heavily in joint projects with American partners, now face the prospect of being frozen out of key markets.

The foreign policy pivot is particularly alarming. The new administration’s embrace of what they call “pragmatic nationalism” has effectively translated into the abandonment of longstanding alliances. NATO, already weakened during Trump’s first term, now faces existential questions about its relevance. The president’s recent remarks about “letting Putin sort out Europe” sent shockwaves through diplomatic circles, yet they barely raised eyebrows in Washington’s new political reality.

For Britain, this presents an excruciating dilemma. Our diplomatic corps, accustomed to navigating the special relationship’s occasional turbulence, now faces a fundamental question: How does one maintain a strategic partnership with a nation that increasingly rejects the very international order it helped create?

The impact on our cyber security is particularly worrying. The integrated nature of British-American cyber defence means that any degradation in cooperation immediately increases our vulnerability to state-sponsored attacks. The National Cyber Security Centre, which has relied heavily on real-time threat intelligence from American partners, reports a significant decrease in the quality and quantity of shared information.

The parallels with historical shifts in global power dynamics are unsettling. Like the decline of previous empires, America’s transition from global stabiliser to potential disruptor isn’t happening through military defeat or economic collapse, but through internal transformation. The machinery of state remains intact; it’s the operating system that’s being rewritten.

Critics might dismiss these concerns as catastrophising from the liberal establishment. But consider the concrete actions: the withdrawal from key international treaties, the deliberate undermining of multilateral institutions, the embrace of authoritarian leaders while democratic allies are publicly berated. These aren’t theoretical risks – they’re happening in real time.

The implications for Britain’s defence posture are stark. Our nuclear deterrent, while operationally independent, relies heavily on American technology and support. The new administration’s ambiguous stance on nuclear cooperation agreements has raised serious questions about long-term sustainability. The Royal Navy’s carrier strike groups, designed to operate in concert with American forces, may need to be reconceptualised for a world where such cooperation cannot be guaranteed.

Some in Whitehall advocate a “wait and see” approach, suggesting that institutional inertia will temper the administration’s more radical impulses. This misreads both the scope of the Project 2025 agenda and the determination of its implementers. The systematic placement of ideological allies throughout the federal bureaucracy creates a multiplication effect that could outlast the administration itself.

What’s required is a clear-eyed reassessment of Britain’s strategic position. This doesn’t mean abandoning the special relationship, but rather reconceptualising it for an era where American partnership comes with new risks and complications. Strengthening European security cooperation, diversifying intelligence partnerships, and building resilience against potential economic coercion should be immediate priorities.

The question isn’t whether America will remain powerful – it will. The question is how that power will be wielded, and whether the international community can adapt to an America that increasingly views global relationships through a transactional, zero-sum lens.

For Britain, this may mean making difficult choices. Our diplomatic tradition of constructive ambiguity – maintaining close ties with both Europe and America – may no longer be sustainable if those relationships pull us in fundamentally different directions.

The coming months will be crucial. As Project 2025’s implementations accelerate and the new administration’s foreign policy takes concrete form, Britain’s response will shape not just bilateral relations but our place in the emerging global order. The special relationship isn’t dead, but it’s entering uncharted territory. We must navigate with our eyes wide open to both the risks and the opportunities this presents.

This isn’t about abandoning our American allies – it’s about protecting our own interests in an era where those allies may be operating under a radically different set of priorities. The question in my headline isn’t merely provocative; it’s one that British policymakers must seriously consider as they plan for an increasingly uncertain future.