Reform has now achieved—or bettered—30 percent in national polls and the most recent round of local council elections, held on May 1. It also squeaked a by-election win over Labour in Runcorn & Helmsby—by a mere six votes—on the same day. The Liberal Democrats, for their part, have beaten the Conservatives into fourth place both at the local elections and in more recent polling. Labour continues to run a (sickly) second, meanwhile, with 20 percent of the vote at the locals and an average of 22 percent in subsequent polls.

If this pattern—it first emerged at last year’s general election, despite Keir Starmer’s “loveless landslide,” of which more below—persists and grows until the 2029 poll, Nigel Farage will be Prime Minister and Ed Davey Leader of the Opposition. The traditional parties of British governance, Labour and Conservative, may be reduced to bit players.

Thirty percent—given the vagaries of British political geography—is what you need to be a serious party here. It’s easiest to explain the significance of breaking the 30 percent pain barrier by telling you what happens when parties miss it. Falling below 30 percent did in the Liberals in 1924 and 1929. It also did in the Liberal-SDP Alliance in 1983, where the combined parties got 25 percent of the vote but only 12 seats. And, last year, it gave the Conservatives what genuinely can be described as a “near death experience,” with the party only saved (23.7 percent vote share for 121 MPs) because some of its core support is geographically concentrated. 2024 was the worst result in the party’s history, and given the Tories are the oldest and most successful political party in the world, Kemi Badenoch, the party’s new leader, has been handed the most poisoned of chalices.

This also explains why there’s no chance Starmer will go to the King and call an early election. Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, would have to die for that to happen.

Why Are We Here?

On July 4, 2024, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a landslide.

As ever in first-past-the-post parliamentary systems, the devil is in the detail. For US readers, it’s easiest to draw comparisons if I tell you that any UK political party winning the same vote share as Donald Trump did in November (49.9 percent) would consider itself to have won the electoral Olympics, to have landed on the political equivalent of “Free Parking” in Monopoly. The last time a British political party came anywhere near that was in 1951, with Labour’s all-conquering Clement Attlee winning 48.8 percent.

By contrast, Labour’s 2024 landslide—nearly two-thirds of Commons seats for a total of 411—discloses little affection, based as it is on less than 60 percent turnout and just over a third of total votes. This is only a little more than Labour won in 2019—with Jeremy Corbyn, now an independent MP, then a genuinely unpopular leader of the opposition—and considerably less than Corbyn’s 2017 achievement (40 percent). Labour’s eventual 2024 vote share—33.8 percent—was lower than any opinion poll.

The only parties that gained ground in terms of vote share were Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats.

Since the election, Labour has shown itself to be afflicted by a sort of Midas Touch in reverse: everything it lays its hands on turns to shit. Britain’s energy bills—both for households and industrial consumption—are the highest in the developed world. The police routinely arrest people for mean tweets while knife crime in London balloons. Facing a budgetary crisis, Chancellor Rachel Reeves cut access to winter fuel payments for ten million pensioners; the policy was so unpopular that Starmer was forced into a humiliating U-turn. Paedophiles get powder-puff sentences while, despite the UK’s reputation as “TERF Island,” a Scottish nurse is forced to undress in a mixed changing room. Until Elon Musk pressed the issue, there was widespread “nothing to see here” behaviour in response to Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs.

Starmer, meanwhile, has discovered the country’s sclerotic civil service has booby-trapped the British state against any future Governments, including Labour ones. It was long believed that the go-slow, work-to-rule behaviour was something it only did to Tories. Not so. Starmer is now confronted with a set of levers that, no matter how hard or how often he pulls them, engage no gears and move nothing, let alone worlds. This has translated into an inability to build anything, not even wind farms—which Starmer’s loopy Energy Secretary, Ed “Net Zero” Miliband, actually wants.

Labour’s support was thus a mile wide and an inch deep: it won a House of Commons landslide, but not an electoral one. Many of Starmer’s MPs—including Cabinet ministers like the (competent) Health Secretary Wes Streeting—sit on wafer-thin margins, making them even more vulnerable than usual in the event of by-elections and internal party conflicts. Talk of US-style “supermajorities” in the UK is silly—you don’t have a different kind of power with a big majority in parliamentary systems. If anything, First Past the Post (FPTP) gave Labour’s fractious, divided electoral coalition a spurious patina of unity. A divided electoral coalition, of course, helped do for the Tories when they had a large majority.

Why Are Farage and Davey Growing in Popularity?

The problem for Badenoch is that Labour’s travails (sometimes over the same issues Conservatives struggled with, like immigration) were preceded by 14 years of inept Tory governance. Apart from talking right and governing left in the last five years of its time in office, it was David Cameron who accepted Blair’s hiving off much of parliament’s power to unelected quangos. Quangos, translated into American, are akin to “non-departmental public bodies,” or “government-sponsored enterprises or even “independent executive agencies.” The quangocracy is at the heart of Britain’s “Blob” and is a significant reason neither Labour nor Conservative governments can do anything. Meanwhile, the civil service busies itself with ever more baroquely colourful lanyards (all the better to wear while evincing what used to be called “workshy behaviour”).

Farage, of course, is helped here precisely because he’s never been in government. Being an MEP, as he was for many years, is not being in government. That was always a significant issue for anyone elected to the European Parliament. This seems a strange thing to say—given how familiar he is to Americans because of his personal friendship with Trump and role in bringing about Brexit—but he only became a sitting MP (for Clacton, in Essex) last year. In that sense, he shares a background with Trump, who, prior to 2016, also had never been in government (or opposition, for that matter).

Labour, perhaps inevitably, provides Farage and Reform with endless political fodder. This ranges from paying Mauritius to take the strategically important Chagos Islands—over the heads of the Chagossians, note—off Britain’s hands or replacing Admiral Nelson’s portrait in Parliament with this simultaneously insipid and hubristic attempt to make a sitting Cabinet Minister look like a cross between the late Queen and a Roman Empress. This, in a country where it was once considered vulgar to have portraits of any living person other than the King hanging in official buildings or on postage stamps. The rationale for the custom was that it prevented Britain from looking like a tin-pot dictatorship, something that clearly worries Labour not a bit.

Yes, the Tories are also able to make hay with this sort of nonsense—and people do laugh at Badenoch’s jokes, she has natural comic timing—but this benefits her party not at all because everyone can remember what they did in (very) recent times. If a week is a long time in politics, 14 years is an eternity.

Ed Davey, for his part, has perfected what can best be described as NOTICE ME politics. He understood early how hard it would be to suck any media oxygen away from the major parties, so changed the Liberal Democrats’ approach for the 2024 general election. This means we’ve been treated to Davey bungee jumping, falling into Lake Windermere while paddle-boarding, wheelbarrow racing, swing dancing with a local club, and—ahem—attempting to surf.

People in the Westminster Village often ridicule him for these publicity stunts, so I’m going to say it because someone must: he’s funny. He even makes me laugh, and I’m not a LibDem voter. The stunts—of which there are many—also lend themselves to the sort of amusing listicles that once made it look like Buzzfeed was going to conquer the global media landscape.

All this silliness, however, has been combined with a ruthless approach to campaigning under the hood. Long known as proponents of electoral reform—precisely because FPTP so often cruelled their chances—under Davey’s direction, the LibDems took a different tack. While maintaining headline support for changes to the UK’s electoral system in their manifesto, their ground game was entirely focused on seats where they’d come second to Conservatives or Labour in 2019—mainly the former. This meant, in 2024, they won 72 seats, only coming second in 27. “More clinical than Erling Haaland,” quipped one Man City fan.

And to prove it wasn’t a fluke, Davey and his party did it again at the locals in May this year.

Prediction is Difficult, Especially About the Future

What does this portend, then, remembering the above aphorism? No doubt, come 2029—and regardless of the result—people will find this piece and take delight in pointing out all the mistakes I’ve made. Hey ho, needs must.

Worth noting here is that Reform’s 30 percent vote share came first from two very different polling outfits and lined up with the local elections result. Survation is famously accurate and scrupulous. Years ago, it won fame for revealing just how unpopular the political ideology of feminism really is in these Islands. Political pundits often joke that they’ll be “waiting for Survation” before forming a final view on any set of numbers. More in Common, by contrast, is far less storied than Survation, but well-regarded for its focus groups. Reform has also consistently underperformed in its polls. When More in Common trips over the same line as Survation, one should take note.

That said, Farage needs to continue to grow his support. A major effect of the fragmentation of the UK two-party system—something so visible it can be expressed mathematically—is that you can win big with a much lower vote share. If Reform wins the 2029 general election on a low thirties vote share, it will have the same problem Labour has now: FPTP will have delivered it a loveless landslide, a Commons majority but not an electoral one. However, there’s evidence Reform hasn’t yet reached its electoral ceiling because it’s getting non-voters to the polls. This was visible even in the low-turnout local elections—and it means higher turnout won’t defeat Reform, at least not anytime soon.

The LibDems, by contrast, probably are close to their upper limit. The strange death of Liberal England was a real thing that happened, and which no amount of clever hijinks and ruthlessly focused campaigning can undo. The party is also vulnerable to what I now suspect will be an incoming Conservative-Reform electoral pact.

Reform can’t win in the posh southern constituencies the LibDems took from the Conservatives in 2024 but can take enough votes from the Tories to stop them winning (as indeed happened). Meanwhile, the Conservatives are probably done for in much of the North and Midlands. All they will do if they run candidates is take seats from Reform and allow Labour—or even worse, a Gaza Independent—to come up on the inside and overtake both. Centre-right politics in the UK now exists in two distinct forms and is strongest in different geographical areas.

I raise electoral pacts here because, in 2011, both Labour and Conservative foolishly campaigned against the opportunity to change the UK’s voting system to a form of preferential voting used in some Australian states. (This series of observations from one of Australia’s famed electoral systems nerds explains just how foolish it was.) The Australian system exists as it does in part because centre-right politics there is geographically split between two distinct groups with different policy preferences. It has been so for roughly 100 years.

In endorsing FPTP, both the majors, but especially the Conservatives, condemned their future selves to pervasive tactical voting—where electors deliberately vote for a candidate they do not support to keep another candidate they like even less from winning the constituency—or formal electoral pacts. I say “formal” because deciding which party will stand down in what seats is a matter of delicate negotiation that must be sorted some time before any general election is held. The normal rule would be that where one of either Reform or Tories ran second to Labour or LibDems in 2024, that second-place getter should get a clear run at the seat. There are, however, situations where this will not apply, so rapid is Reform’s advance.

At the time of writing, both Farage and Badenoch are assuring all and sundry there will be no electoral pact, giving Starmer breathing room neither he nor Labour deserve. Will tub-thumping purity win over easing the path to power? For the Tories, an electoral pact could guarantee their long-term political survival—but also give Reform valuable policy heft. The question for Farage is more complex. Just how toxic is any association with the Tory brand for his current and future voters? And if he does win power, will he be like the dog that caught the car—or his own tail?

What are you going to do with it, PM Farage, now you’ve got it?

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These counter-elites comprise governments-in-waiting for the countries most heavily represented (Australia, Canada, France, UK), as well as from countries where counter-elites have already triumphed (USA, Argentina). They are organised and—unlike in 2016—engaging in careful policy development. The extensive Australian input on this point is notable: people in other nations want a bit of Australia’s high state capacity and are willing to listen to those who helped produce it.

This development—included in my ARC ticket was a fat goody-bag full not of conference stash or an ARC mug but multiple booklets of crunchy, carefully costed policy analysis—is taking place untrammelled by a need to moderate aims they now know to be widely popular. On this point, Javier Milei and Donald Trump have provided proof of concept. Both men are now either more popular or as popular than they were when elected—and they were popular then—probably the most significant indicator of a “vibe shift” or “preference cascade.”

Why Counter-Elites?

They’re counter-elites because they share many, if not all, of the same characteristics with those they oppose. Jordan Peterson is a product of UToronto and Harvard. Helen Joyce went to Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin. JD Vance is a Yale man. I could go on. All—to greater or lesser degrees—reject the bulk of what they were taught at university about social justice, feminism, inequality, race, environmentalism, colonialism, and economics. Many are liberals, but they reject much of left-liberalism and all left progressivisms.

However, most were forced to read and respond to it—something I (Oxford, Edinburgh) have experienced as well. This makes them dangerous to their ideological opponents, and often more able. Most modern leftists refuse to engage with conservative or classical liberal thought, even excluding mild figures like Michael Oakeshott or F. A. Hayek from their literary diet.

In identifying and describing counter-elites, I’m drawing on Peter Turchin’s thinking. I’m neither rejecting nor endorsing his wider claims about elite overproduction and consequent civil disorder, though. It’s important in this context to remember that counter-elites have power—less of it than ruling elites, true—but still considerable.

Often, this combines cultural with economic power. Jordan Peterson is a phenomenon in part because he started with culture and has now moved towards social organisation and policy development. Elon Musk is a phenomenon because he started in business and manufacturing but now combines it with policy development and cultural heft. This places them and people like them in a strong position to seize their respective countries’ commanding heights, as Musk has done and Peterson is likely to do following the results of the next Canadian election.

What do they believe?

Like their opponents, the ARC-ers are ideologically diverse, while being broadly right-leaning. There is significant disagreement, however, especially about economic policy—and those wrangles do traverse the conventional left-right divide. The Australians and Argentinians present were uniformly pro-free trade (and free trade is indeed very good for both countries) but the Americans and some of the Europeans far less so. This has come about for two reasons.

Foolishly, open borders (or something quite close to it) have been allowed to be coupled in the public mind with free trade. At the same time, historic claims made for the positive effects—economic and otherwise—of high rates of immigration have been falsified. The claim is only true when immigrants are selected and, importantly, refugees are also selected—that is, assessed before admission in much the same way as regular immigrants. That means most are excluded based on poor cultural or religious fit, regardless of how much they may be persecuted in their countries of origin. When academic economists make claims in favour of free trade or in opposition to industrial policy, they are often discounted or ignored because they were wrong about immigration.

The Australian position on this point is also thereby explained.

Mind you, the joy various speakers got out of shredding mainstream economists—academics and regulators like the Bank of England were written off as dopey, partisan hacks who can’t count and produce papers that don’t replicate—was a sight to behold. A sub-group among the counter-elite economists is also responsible for working out the extent to which the modern progressive left—that seemed until January 20 to bestride the Anglosphere and EU like a colossus—is utterly dependent on state largesse. In the last three years—as support collapsed at home—the UK’s pro-trans “charity” Stonewall received the bulk of its funding from the State Department, for example. Leftists generally can’t make money, so they have a parasitic relationship with taxpayers and donors. This explains why DOGE’s first target was USAID, which turned out to be as Musk described: “just a ball of worms.”

Consistent with the name, the ARC-ers are more comfortable with religion than existing elites: mainly Christianity, but there’s considerable affection for Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Islam, meanwhile, is bluntly characterised as a civilisational enemy and a religion of bloody disorder. Despite the presence of significant numbers of atheists—including prominent ones like Cynical Theories coauthor James Lindsay—the religiosity surprised even some of my American friends.

The tension between soaring religious expression and crunchy policy depth was evident throughout the conference, but most obvious in the debates around border control and the rejection of victimhood claims based on historic disadvantage (even Jews got a slap, at least in private conversation, if they went too far with it). A re-balancing towards national sovereignty and strict border control means rejecting the imago dei (about which many Christians spoke, often movingly) as a policy guide. Australian-style immigration policy applied across the developed world would entail accepting that not all groups and religions are equal—let alone individuals—and that not all pleas for help or experiences of historic victimhood deserve a hearing. This is something with which political Christianity struggles, as the public TwitterX spat between JD Vance and Rory Stewart over it three weeks ago illustrates.

The Christian patina—but not, notably, the Jewish, Hindu, or Buddhist one—also did not work well with what is a widespread rejection of the “liberal international” or “global rules-based” order. As with economics, this is something over which the ARC-ers disagree. While we delegates were all in various conference sessions and break-out debates, Trump was busy hanging Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelenskyy out to dry via Truth Social. Unsurprisingly, Trump and Vance’s policy in Ukraine has also divided the political right outside ARC. Current global debate over the issue is best described as furious.

I plan to write in more detail about Ukraine in the future, but for now, I’ll make a couple of observations based on what I saw.

The most obvious one is that Ukraine—likely at Zelenskyy’s behest, and in response to a Biden White House plus a liberal-progressive EU—oriented its entire propaganda campaign from 24 February 2022 onwards towards appealing to the global liberal left, even the global progressive left. Those of us familiar with the country (I wrote an entire book about it) understood this was nonsense. On some metrics, Ukraine is more conservative than Russia (among other things, it has many conservative Catholics, which Russia lacks).

This attempt to manufacture wokery for global consumption had the effect of creating a toy Ukraine stripped of both its history and culture, as well as aligning it in the minds of many members of the US public with bonkers crap like “men are women” or “there is no crisis at the US border” or “America is a white supremacist nation.” This reached its nadir when Canada’s Speaker of the House of Commons invited a Ukrainian Waffen-SS veteran to its Parliament and hailed him a war hero.

As was clear within 24 hours of the US election result, voters were so repulsed by the river of bullshit flowing through their country that they were willing to call other, more arguable things—the global rules-based order is one—into question. Meanwhile, Europeans are being reminded daily how unwise it is to get their energy policy from a teenage Swedish school truant.

Coeval with this is the fact that, for Trump, the Ukraine war is personal. The country—and Zelenskyy himself—is associated with the Biden family, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and vast corruption. These are all things about which Trump is right to be angry, even if one loathes his vindictiveness. A couple may stay together after adultery by one of the pair, but the relationship is never the same.

A Hail of Dead Cats

One reason both the Democrats and press are reeling—and intense debate over Ukraine has not dented Trump’s popularity—is the way he and his team are releasing executive orders. This takes in careful choices about what matters are dealt with (genderwoo, USAID, DEI, Israel-Gaza, Department of Education, Ukraine), but is also an example of what Steve Bannon calls “flooding the zone,” throwing out so many newsworthy stories it’s difficult for opponents to respond.

There’s a concept in Australian political analysis—which several people brought up at ARC in conversation with me—I think more enlightening than Bannon’s phrase. It goes by the name “dead cat strategy” or “throwing a dead cat on the table.” Traditionally, it’s used as a distraction if your side is in a bit of political bother. In 2013, Boris Johnson described how “they will be talking about the dead cat, the thing you want them to talk about, and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”

However, a dead cat strategy can be even more effective when what you’re doing is popular—as many of Trump’s executive orders currently are—and the dead cats themselves are more than mere diversions. There are errors great and small in Musk’s claims (here is a detailed analysis of his Social Security comments from a Trump voter who happens also to be a mathematician), but because Trump keeps throwing a dead cat on the USA’s dining-room table just at the point his opposition have removed the previous one, these criticisms seldom make their way to the wider public. The whole exercise is a hail of dead cats. 

Trump’s decisive electoral victory is also disrupting politics in the rest of the Anglosphere plus France and Germany. Musk is happy to be Trump’s social media battering ram. ARC, meanwhile, is providing much of the intellectual and policy heft for a global counter-elite insurgency.

No wonder security around the ExCeL was tight. I had to point out—especially to naïve, used-to-safety Australians—that the many working dogs and their handlers had nothing to do with drugs. They were explosives detection dogs, and the brains-trust assembled in that venue was indeed a target.

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However, other countries can also wreak ideological havoc, even quite small countries. It’s worse, I suspect, when those small countries have a reputation for peace and prosperity and order and competence in areas other than academic scholarship. Australia is one such country. And Australia is responsible for about half—perhaps more—of the settler-colonial theory now exploding metaphorically all over US university campuses and literally all over Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon.

Worse, the ideology of settler-colonialism has a deleterious effect in the USA and Australia because it plays on a pair of distinctive national weaknesses neither country shares with the other. Briefly, Australia’s tall poppy syndrome (a bad trait) is corrosive to American exceptionalism (a bad trait). Carping, Australian-style attacks on a country’s sense of itself can dissolve the epoxy resin holding a national story together—especially one with the soaring optimism of America’s—and must be used with great caution. Let me explain.

Going Home

In October last year, I returned to Australia after a six-year, pandemic-induced absence. While I was there—in fits-and-starts, touring the country and eating too many salted peanuts in various airport lounges—I read Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence and Justice. I did so in part because October 2024 was the one-year anniversary of two important events, one much better known globally than the other. The first, on October 7, concerned Israel-Palestine. The second, on October 14, concerned an Australian constitutional referendum. Both concerned what Kirsch calls “the ideology of settler-colonialism” and others refer to as “decolonisation.”

I’ve written elsewhere about Australia’s failed constitutional referendum and the troubling way national debate before and after it was coloured by poisonous “decolonial” rhetoric. Unlike Kirsch—who came to the likes of Franz Fanon and Patrick Wolfe in the wake of October 7—I’m long familiar with both. I encountered settler-colonialism as an exercise in moral derangement at 17, under the name “post-colonial literatures.” This was in 1990, in Australia.

However, because Fanon (and other simpatico theorists, like Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak) wrote before Australians like Wolfe or Peter Read or Robert Manne or Lorenzo Veracini, I’d always viewed the various decolonisation and genocide theories popular among Australian humanities academics as imports. I was wrong to do so. The likes of Fanon may have believed benighted, murderous things—his Marxism comes to mind—but those ideas were nonetheless worked up in response to genuine wars of independence and wider civil conflict. They were then grafted—very, very awkwardly—onto dissimilar Australian history and conditions by that country’s intellectuals and exported thereafter throughout the English-speaking world.

Like past Helen, Kirsch observes a pattern where Australian and later Canadian or American scholars borrow bits of Fanon to give a sanguinary rhetorical garnish to their writing. “Fanon’s praise of violence is a large part of his appeal for Western intellectuals,” he notes. “Many of the sentiments expressed in The Wretched of the Earth, coming from a European or American writer, would immediately be identified as fascistic.”

This, Kirsch argues, is because—outside Israel—the ideology is little more than a parlour game. Given how few indigenous people there are in countries where these arguments are most often mounted, “everyone knows that calls to ‘eradicate,’ ‘kill,’ or ‘cull’ settlers can be only metaphorical,” Kirsch observes wryly, “so there is no need to put a limit on their rhetorical ferocity.”

Poppy-chopping

Which brings me back to Australia. The various Australian organisations hosting me converged on a single request, albeit one with differences of detail: they wanted me to provide an aetiology of cancel culture. I’m generally considered Australia’s Patient Zero when it comes to the modern phenomenon, which includes a mix of doxxing, snitching to the employer, and complaints to professional associations—based on the target’s publicly or privately expressed political views.

Identifying those components meant discussing professional jealousy and workplace bullying as much as things like, say, Graham Linehan’s Father Ted musical being canned because he thinks men aren’t women. In an Australian context, that means tackling the country’s well-known “tall poppy syndrome” and its people’s related tendency to be “a nation of knockers.” To knock something in Australia is to criticise it, but in a pessimistic and undermining way. How much of cancel culture, I was forced to ask—at least in Australia—is down to a perception that not a few people are unjustly rewarded, separate from any views they may (or may not) hold?

Until those conversations, I found Kirsch’s description of the Frankenstein mix of Australian and third-worldist ideology that swept all before it when introduced to the United States unpersuasive. Somehow, even the cringeworthy Australian custom of land acknowledgments has managed to spread first to Canada and then the US in a reversal of the usual process whereby America sneezes and so gives its Hat a cold. Why did this nonsense take root?

Australia’s tall poppy syndrome—which manifests in the harsh way it treats its most gifted—can in mild forms be socially useful. It stops people—often clever young people of school age—from thinking they’re better than others or have a right to tell them what to do based purely on intellect or wealth. Directed at someone who does think rather too well of himself, it’ll be morally improving.

However, it can spill over into nit-picking disapproval, where nothing the targeted “poppy” does is any good: damned if you do, damned if you don’t—a sort of schoolyard Kafka Trap. Viewed at the highest level of abstraction, applied as it sometimes is to entire sporting teams, standout entrepreneurs, and gifted artists, it’s a net negative. It’s one of those bits of Australia that—as a rule—just isn’t for export. It’s also facilitated the globalisation of another unpleasant Australian trait: the “cultural cringe,” a belief that everything done by foreigners must be better than anything done at home.

Unfortunately, the Australian talent for poppy-chopping finds its métier in taking the US down. While decolonisation as an academic programme has (predictably) targeted Australian education and sought (in Kirsch’s words) to “validate the most extreme criticism and denunciation” of the country, do remember Australia has no sense of temporal exceptionalism. Australia has national myths, of course, but the country has never seen itself as an emanation of the divine will or the pivot upon which history turns. The ideology of settler-colonialism thus shrinks the US in a way it doesn’t Australia. Australians are under no illusions about their national founding when people “knock” Australia’s post-1788 history. That history provides inspiration for every work of science fiction featuring a violent penal colony or inhospitable prison planet.

There was nothing deliberate about putting Australia’s tall poppy syndrome to work undermining American proposition nationalism, either. My father always maintained that there’s such a thing as black serendipity. This is an example. In something resembling introduced species in island ecologies, the foreign transplant has grown wild: grey squirrels in the UK; rabbits, cane toads, prickly pear in Australia; cats in New Zealand.

People in America—most of them academics—were receptive to the claims of settler-colonialism, and the battle was soon joined between this pair of distinctive national weaknesses. When settler-colonial ideology was competently argued for by someone whose first language was English and who emerged from a familiar intellectual tradition—Wolfe was all these—and then stripped of much of Fanon’s Marxism, it took. A lot of odd nerds with niche obsessions who hadn’t been taken seriously in either the USA or Australia found a great way to get revenge.

And the USA is the tallest poppy of them all.

Although destructive of “manifest destiny” historiography widespread in the nineteenth century, Kirsch is right that decolonisation theory also degrades Martin Luther King’s more inclusive vision for the country. King’s promissory note metaphor only works if American civilisation and the US nation are worth joining—only if King the creditor is lining up to get his debt paid. However—in the zero-sum world of settler-colonial ideology—the United States should not exist.

This emerges naturally from the oft-quoted Wolfe aphorism that “invasion is a structure, not an event,” a trauma constantly renewed because the ideology transforms “settler” into a heritable identity. “Every inhabitant of a settler colonial society who is not descended from the original indigenous population,” Kirsch says, “is, and always will be, a settler.”

“Settler” here includes people transported to both America and Australia in chains—slaves and convicts. And yes, that seems like the category error to end all category errors. But once Fanon is Australianised, this kind of reasoning becomes pervasive. African Americans “benefit from the settler-colonial system as it stands today,” the Southern Poverty Law Centre tells us, in very serious tones.

Forced Teaming

Kirsch’s attempt to explain how Australia was analogised with Fanon’s Algeria and then how Israel was analogised with Wolfe’s Australia is heroic but ultimately fruitless, in part because the casuistry he seeks to elucidate is so tortured. The phrase “forced teaming”—borrowed from law enforcement—captures the extent to which these countries are … not like each other. Evidence that Australia’s ideologues of settler-colonialism haven’t thought their thoughts through to the end is pervasive. At one stage, Kirsch discusses how Veracini believes “that referring to Algerians and Palestinians as Arabs is transferist, because it implies that they are part of a larger collective that inhabits many places, rather than belonging exclusively to Algeria or Palestine.”

Apart from the fact that Arabs tend to refer to themselves as Arabs (often with some pride), this occludes the fact that Arabs in many countries—and especially Algeria, the Ur-nation of settler-colonial theory—are themselves settlers. Arabs and Turks—along with Europeans—produced expansive and imperialistic religious cultures notable for their ability to supplant entire prior civilisations.

One of Fanon’s rhetorical sleights of hand is to class all Algeria’s non-imperial residents as natives. This creates a generic indigenous identity that obscures any history, including that the only difference between the nineteenth and twentieth-century French and the seventh and eighth-century Arabs is that the Arabs made their cultural, religious, institutional, and settlement stick. The French did not.

Some of this confusion is down to Australians failing to distinguish their roughly forty thousand years of Aboriginal prehistory from Algeria’s extensive recorded history. Australians of all political stripes have often sought to make their country’s national story more impressive than it is by laying claim to that long period of forager civilisation. Aborigines have been in Australia for longer than Native Americans in the US, while neighbouring New Zealand is younger than Canterbury Cathedral: the Māori got there in about 1300. However, Australian Aborigines were not like the Arabs who dotted Algeria with magnificent mosques or the Italians who left it glorious (and under-visited) Roman ruins. History and pre-history are importantly different. Those people were representatives of major imperial civilisations with everything this entails. So were the later French.

The law’s great gift to public reason is precision argument based on analogy and comparison. How is this like or not like that? Is this case on all fours? At bottom, settler-colonial ideology is an utter failure of analogical reasoning, and it makes this lawyer’s toes curl.

That said, it’s nonsense pre-history as well. Waves of invasion and dispossession are a feature of Homo sapien prehistory from before we were human. Forager populations are at particular risk of full, or near full, replacement because population numbers are low. It’s easy for small groups to drop below the capacity to sustain themselves, while invading foragers lack the motive or capacity to incorporate newcomers into their societies in number. Forager skills are also of limited use to invading farmers or pastoralists.

The Homo sapien forager populations that replaced Homo neanderthalensis in Europe were replaced in their turn. Even the farmer-builders of Stonehenge—who had replaced the previous foraging population—were almost entirely replaced by pastoralist invaders. Waves of newcomers to the Americas pushed previous arrivals South long before Europeans arrived. Brutal wars were a feature of human societies in the Americas both before, and during, European settlement.

Political Theology

This replacement of history with myth leads Kirsch to argue the ideology is a “political theology,” that is, a secularised religious concept expressed civically. A form of original sin where the everlasting process of colonisation means never-ending exploitation, racism, misogyny, and genocide, it suggests only the Noble Savage that is the Native can redeem us.

In one of the field’s most influential papers, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Eve Tuck of SUNY New Paltz and K. Wayne Yang of UC San Diego write that “relinquishing settler futurity” is necessary if we are to imagine “the Native futures, the lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone.”

And here’s me thinking futurity referred to a competitive equestrian event for younger horses.

As Kirsch says, “The goal is not to change this or that public policy but to engender a permanent disaffection, a sense that the social order ought not to exist.” So intellectually moribund is it, I caught myself preferring Hamas’s 1988 Islamist charter to its 2017, all-singing, all-dancing, re-written decolonial charter. The former has merits of candour and clarity, coupled with a deranged but nonetheless worked-through theology. The latter is word salad.

Much of On Settler-Colonialism turns on Kirsch’s argument that because it requires policies that can never be implemented (“deport 97 per cent of the US population!”), it’s merely depressing and stupid. “America should not exist” is never analysed with a view to doing anything apart from making the place miserable with itself. Israel, by contrast, is “much younger and smaller than the United States, and it is easier to imagine its disappearance, but again, not without massive death and destruction.”

I’m not sure I agree with this. October 14, 2023, is where it led a prosperous, peaceful, well-governed, and far richer country than Israel or its Arab neighbours. Just after the Hamas slaughter in Israel, Australians voted on whether a “Voice to Parliament”—a dedicated body of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representatives—should be included in their Constitution, to assuage Australia’s settler-colonial sins.

As public support fell before polling day, the YES campaign—in a pattern familiar to those who remember the UK’s 2016 Brexit referendum—began to reek of both condescension and victimhood. Anyone pointing out problems was stupid, duplicitous, and racist: an oppressor of Aboriginal people. After the defeat, YES continued to stigmatise NO voters as racist and ignorant and intensified its decolonial rhetoric. There was no violence, but I did wonder what could have happened had the result been close.

No, this isn’t Israel or Gaza. Australia hasn’t endured murdered hostages or flattened hospitals; endless missile strikes or artillery barrages; thousands upon thousands of deaths. But it’s not nothing, either. If Australia and America are on stolen land, this denies existing constitutional protections to current landholders. That’s the sort of thing that just invites lawfare and conflict.

Some of Australia’s cultural cringe is warranted. Australians are brilliant empiricists with a flair for civic organisation and public administration, but we suck at abstract intellectualism. Our most capable people enter the professions, public administration, agriculture, and natural resources development. They do not become university academics. The admissions structure in Australian higher education—which has existed since 1945, so covers nearly everyone in the country still alive—means the gifted are creamed off and allocated to the hands-on roles at which Australians excel. Humanities and social sciences get the leftovers.

I suspect even very patriotic Americans must get bored of national exceptionalism. The ideology of settler colonialism pulls on that thread, drawing on Australia’s tall poppy syndrome to unravel America’s national story: how dare you put yourself up so high? Don’t let it. You can address a national tendency to blow too much smoke up your country’s bum without believing everything you’ve ever done or will do is genocidal.

Everyone on earth is living on “stolen” land. Move on.

The post Australia’s Most Dangerous Export appeared first on Law & Liberty.

The 2024 Olympics had two blokes win in women’s boxing, a US gymnast who got a medal taken off her, given to her, then swiped away again (after the podium presentation to boot), and a Frenchman who knocked the pole vault bar off with his willy. This came on top of a polluted Seine and an opening ceremony consistent with historic French decadence but not with historic French class.

“I see the Seine is the only river in the world that flows upside down,” one friend quipped. “All the shit’s on the top.”

For Raygun to top that lot with what is probably Australia’s greatest sporting faceplant is quite something. Rachael Gunn was more than Twitter’s main character: she became an object of global fascination, and at the time of writing, still is. Much of the perplexity is borne of the contrast between her nation’s obvious sporting success—not only at this Olympics—and her own lack of ability.

Australia doesn’t produce world-beaters in every sport—no nation does, not even behemoths like China or the USA, or the Soviet Union and East Germany back in Cold War days—but its standards are consistently high. Meanwhile, Australia’s best male athletes often don’t aspire to the Olympics. It’s possible to make a good living playing one of the country’s four football codes (rugby league, rugby union, Australian rules football, association football), or, alternatively, cricket—Australia’s true national game. More recently, professional netball has started swiping talented women, especially if they’re tall.

Given Australia has roughly the same population as Texas while doing all this, it’s reasonable to ask why this team from a tiny country is, as NPR put it, “an Olympic superpower.”

Some of the reasons are localised: Australia is wealthy and well-governed (think Switzerland, but in the southern hemisphere). It also has a deceptively large population in genetic terms (thanks to high rates of both immigration and intermarriage), as I explained to James Patterson in a Law & Liberty podcast earlier this month. This means a surfeit of local talent and the money to spot it.

However, part of this phenomenon is rooted in Australia’s membership of the British Commonwealth, which requires further explanation.

Two and a half years ago, Rachel Lu wrote what remains the best article ever published in Law & Liberty: “The Sporting Genius of the English-Speaking Peoples.” Much of her piece turns on the astonishing British ability to invent high-quality, participatory, community-building team sports that then “go global.” This flair, as she points out, also emerged throughout the Commonwealth (as Australians and Canadians developed Australian rules football and ice hockey) and that other English-speaking superpower, the USA (with the invention of basketball and baseball). Her argument concerns all those countries, not just Australia. It is true to greater or lesser degrees for all of them.

This passage applies with particular intensity to Australia, however:

In the English-speaking world, we value rule of law. Within the realm of law, personal excellence and innovation become more possible, because people trust that their labors will be worthwhile. This observation is commonplace in the realm of political theory, and in economics, but it is equally relevant to sport. Team sports involve a delicate balance between cooperation and competition, which can only be achieved with the help of complex rules, authoritative referees, and players who respect the game itself. Without that shared respect, team sports will never reach high levels of excellence. Why would anyone spend years cultivating the idiosyncratic skill set needed to be (say) an elite right tackle, unless he trusted that the game would be played properly? Those efforts can only pay off in a game with clear rules, reliable referees, and a general understanding that all will uphold the integrity of the game.

When team sports are played well, they have their own kind of dynamism, which mirrors the fruitfulness we see in free markets, and free cultures. The broader dynamics are similar. A successful team must harness the talents of individual players, but those individuals must also cooperate, understanding themselves to be part of a larger whole. As in every other area of life, it can be quite difficult to find the correct balance between fostering individual excellence and encouraging group cohesion. That’s why it is so difficult to invent a good team sport. There’s a reason so many cultures have fallen back on the obvious: just seeing who can run the fastest.

When I was a child, my father pointed out that every liberal democracy on earth embodied—in some way, often idiosyncratic—the French tripartite motto: liberté, égalité, fraternité.

However, because other liberal democracies are not France, they emphasise different aspects of her revolutionary hendiatris. The US is the land of liberté. France herself, meanwhile, cares most about égalité. Australia’s core social value, however, was and is fraternité, which my father always translated using a term associated with trade unions: solidarity.

Politically, where the US favours liberty and rights over democracy and majorities, Australia favours democracy and majorities over liberty and rights. From the mid-nineteenth-century onwards, the country acquired a reputation as “the working man’s paradise” thanks to high wages and a powerful trade union movement. Its electoral system—with its extensive use of compulsion, referendums, and demands that all the people must decide—underwrites what my father considered a form of secular communitarianism.

The best explanation for Raygun’s terrible effort and her presence at the Olympics amid a stellar performance from an able national team is this: she emerged from a tradition that does not enshrine excellence. That tradition is the academy. Yes, Rachael Gunn has a PhD in “cultural studies.” She lectures in it at Australia’s Macquarie University. It’s called Deterritorializing Gender in Sydney’s Breakdancing scene: a B-girl’s Experience of B-boying. Follow the link. I promise I am not making this up.

Since opening the universities to the less able and then teaching them things like cultural studies (calculus and Chaucer are too hard, I’m afraid), the academy’s midwits have decided the rest of us need to hear about their scholarly infatuations with often inferior products of popular culture. This is why there are entire papers written on Big Brother (the reality telly show, not George Orwell and 1984) and entire doctoral theses written on … breakdancing. And yes, while I’m aware that Raygun is Australia’s academic humiliation, Americans should recall that their nation’s superior appellate court was forced to tell its universities to stop admitting thickos. That universities are now full of dimbulbs among both staff and students is a global problem.

Going down the Raygun rabbit hole meant I established that Gunn and her husband didn’t rig the selection trials, and hadn’t used their positions to prevent funding going to more talented dancers from rural and regional Australia. Nonetheless, selections for Australia’s breaking athletes were cocked up in a way that seldom occurs in such a well-run, sporty country. They were organised and promoted by an outfit traditionally oriented towards competitive ballroom dancing (something at which Australia also excels—don’t ask, just watch Strictly Ballroom and all will be revealed), and which only added breaking as an afterthought.

Rachael Gunn does have a professional background in dance choreography and is clearly much fitter and more coordinated than most 36-year-olds. Footage of her doing “a better performance at the Closing Ceremony” while she was out and about with the rest of the Australian team would seem to indicate someone who probably isn’t of Olympic standard and who still shouldn’t have been there, but she can nonetheless dance.

For whatever reason, Gunn decided that the academy was her route into both an art form and a sport. Unfortunately, she brought with her the academy’s norms, and they ran slap-bang into Australian sport’s intense focus on excellence. Merit vs. Inclusion went with Raygun to the Olympics: the results were not pretty. Special prize to the wag who suggested we “make an Anzac biscuit in the shape of Australia’s greatest treasure.” One can see this not only in the memes (oh my, the memes), but also in the skill of various Paralympian breakdancers with whom Raygun was often compared.

The Paralympics, you see, aren’t “inclusive” either. The athletes may be disabled, but they are still exceptional athletes. Watch these blokes incorporate crutches into their routine and tell me it isn’t incredible. I’m not convinced breaking should be a competitive sport for either Olympians or Paralympians, but those crutch guys are good. Dr Dre’s point that poor quality breaking at the Olympics leads people to think the entire art form/sport is rubbish is also a fair one. I mean, my partner was suggesting a new Olympic sport after we ate too many blackberries on one of our walks. “Could do anything for Britain, I suppose.”

After the world and his wife had a giant belly laugh—and as part of her new role as social media’s main character—Gunn was dogpiled in a way familiar to anyone who’s experienced a public cancellation. People like comedian Graham Linehan or philosopher Kathleen Stock could probably comment usefully here. This led Australia’s chef de mission, Anna Meares—an astonishingly accomplished track cyclist—to intervene and defend her. Part of Meares’s defence turned on Gunn’s willingness to “have a go.” Having a go forms part of Australia’s commendable cultural solidarity: you don’t know until you try, so why not be in it? A famed Australian advertising campaign turned on the slogan Life: Be in It.

Unfortunately (and Meares knows this), the Olympics is not the place to “have a go.” You have a go when you’re first starting out. Raygun represents, I’m afraid, the opposite of excellence—the summit of all shall have prizes. Yes, I get that the academy shouldn’t be like this—and wasn’t always—but it is now. Just as popular culture doesn’t really belong in the academy, the academy doesn’t really belong in the Olympics, either, in part because the academy has stopped, in recent years, being about excellence.

I do think it’s to the nation’s credit that other athletes in the Australian team—not just Meares—protected Raygun. They went to great lengths—in that intensely loyal Australian way—to defend her from hyperbolic trolling, to evince solidarity. If she’s at all capable of introspection, it may change her view of her country. Like many of her kind, she’s an aficionado of the fashionable brain rot known as decolonisation. Sport in Australia “is connected to a kind of idealised settler-colonial masculinity” she says, while breaking’s inclusion in the Olympics will institutionalise “this sporting nation’s hegemonic settler-colonial structures that rely upon racialized (sic) and gendered hierarchies.” Righto then.

The takeaway, I suppose, is that you cannot have humouring and headpatting in the Olympics from the country that runs fourth overall. Eddie the Eagle amused a lot of people but was also the butt of a lot of jokes. The IOC changed the rules after the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary so there wouldn’t be a repeat. This, I suspect, is because Eddie was from the UK, a rich country. Eric the Eel, by contrast, raised everyone’s spirits in Sydney 2000 because he came from a developing nation with a wildcard entry.

He really was having a go.

The post Merit, Inclusion, and Raygun at the Olympics appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Yes, the US has four slain presidents to the UK’s solitary slain prime minister, but the US hasn’t lost a sitting congressman since 1978. In the same period, the UK has had five MPs murdered, four of them by sectarian terrorists.

Of these four MPs murdered in the name of one or another version of “God,” three were victims of Northern Ireland’s Troubles and only the last, Tory MP Sir David Amess in 2021, was killed by an Islamist. That Islamist, however, had already been after another Tory MP, Mike Freer.  Freer, who is gay and pro-Israel, was eventually chased out of public life—late last year—when his constituency office was burnt down.

In the leadup to our July 4 general election, it was Labour’s turn to have both sitting and would-be MPs intimidated and harassed—with women and “the wrong sort of Muslims” as primary targets.

There have, of course, been other ghastly warnings of something like this coming down the pike, one of them as recent as February this year: George Galloway’s by-election victory in Rochdale.

Galloway’s method—and that of his pop-up political parties over the years, currently Workers’ Party of Great Britain, formerly Respect—is built on fusing religious conservatism and socialist economic planning with third-worldist positions on foreign policy. This is how he manages to ride on the coattails of widespread Muslim anger about Palestine while uniting working-class white and Muslim voters around law, order, and local amenities.

Rochdale is in Greater Manchester and was once a wealthy Victorian mill town—it did very well out of the Industrial Revolution. It was also the birthplace of the modern cooperative movement (where a business structure developed in Roman times was skilfully repurposed as a successful vehicle for working-class financial uplift).

There are still many fine old buildings to be found locally: once rich enough to put them up, Rochdale was later too poor to knock them down and replace them with hideous “New Town” brutalism. There is some evidence Adolf Hitler coveted Rochdale’s spectacular Victorian Town Hall, which is why (allegedly) it wasn’t bombed during WWII.

Rochdale spent many years as a Labour-LibDem marginal, itself politically unusual. Most marginal LibDem constituencies are held against Conservatives, and in wealthy parts of the country. The former party is where the latter’s (posher) voters go when they’re annoyed with Team Blue. Rochdale is poor, and in the 2016 Referendum voted heavily Leave. The LibDems, recall, were so pro-Remain they wanted to scrap the 2016 Referendum result without even troubling to hold a second referendum.

Rochdale now, however, presents a picture of sad decline, driven into the ground thanks to decades of profligate local councils, de-industrialisation, Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs, and a string of inept and predatory MPs. And I mean predatory in the proper sense, not “he fiddled his expenses.”

Cyril Smith—a truly gross individual—was Rochdale’s immovable Liberal MP for decades. While he was MP (and even before he was elected), he molested boys at local children’s homes—including ones he’d helped found. In some respects, Smith provided a warning of the extent to which choosy-choice liberalism really can degenerate into licence. His misadventures fall on a Liberal Party continuum that includes party leader David Steel turning a blind eye to Smith’s criminal activities and the extraordinary Jeremy Thorpe “Dog in the Fog” scandal.

Galloway capitalised on all this terrible history, but a win wasn’t guaranteed until he was heaved over the line thanks to an unforced error. Labour disendorsed its own candidate (Azhar Ali) for saying very similar things about Israel-Palestine to, ahem, the eventual winner—George Galloway. Of course, Sir Keir Starmer forced Ali to walk back his comments and to apologise before disendorsing him. Coming so late, this meant Ali’s name could not be removed from the ballot paper on polling day, creating constituency-wide confusion.

Starmer claimed afterwards that Galloway would have lost had Labour managed its candidate selection process better. Given that Labour won Rochdale back on July 4—helped greatly by choosing Paul Waugh, a local boy made good born in (and genuinely proud of) the constituency—the UK’s new PM would seem to have a point.

Except Labour lost six seats amid its enormous landslide, four to a group now (unofficially) labelled “the Gaza Independents” and one each to the Conservatives and Greens. The Tory gain came about because various Islamic grouplets and former MPs—all on the left—split the vote in Leicester East so thoroughly the Tories overtook the lot of them on the inside, riding home on the back of an (undivided) Hindu vote. It was to be the Party’s only win. The Green victory came when Muslims and woke students in Bristol Central formed a red-green alliance, tipping out Labour’s (mildly) pro-Israel MP.

These odd results emerged thanks to the UK’s gimcrack, first-past-the-post electoral system. Labour’s landslide—nearly two thirds of Commons seats for a total of 411—discloses little love, based as it is on less than sixty per cent turnout and just over a third of the UK’s votes. This is only a little more than Labour won in 2019—when Jeremy Corbyn, now an independent MP, was leader—and considerably less than what Corbyn achieved in 2017. Labour’s eventual vote share—33.8 per cent—was lower than any opinion poll.

Labour’s support is thus a mile wide and an inch deep. Many of Starmer’s MPs—including Cabinet ministers like Health Secretary Wes Streeting—sit on wafer-thin margins, making them even more vulnerable than usual in the event of by-elections and internal party conflicts. Talk of US-style “supermajorities” is silly—you don’t have a different kind of power with a big majority in parliamentary systems. If anything, FPTP has given Labour’s fractious, divided electoral coalition a spurious patina of unity. A divided electoral coalition, of course, helped do for the Tories when they had a large majority.

Meanwhile, Reform achieved 14.4 per cent of the national vote and five seats (six if you count the Northern Irish MP who caucuses with them), and the Greens four on 6.8 per cent of the vote. Salad days.

The ugliness of the campaign directed at some Labour MPs bubbled to the surface as polls were declared up and down the country in the early morning of July 5. “I understand that a strong woman standing up to you is met with such reticence,” Jess Phillips said, icily, as her majority was cut to a mere 693 votes and she was relentlessly heckled. “A young woman on her own delivering leaflets on polling day was filmed and screamed at by a much older man in the street,” she said in her victory speech. This came on the back of harassment throughout the campaign: slashed tyres, in-your-face street confrontations, and something probably more familiar to Americans than Britons—attacks on sitting MPs’ religious faith. Rochdale, in that sense, was a warning.

Muslims who supported Labour or who were—even worse—Labour MPs were labelled “infidels” who would “feel the wrath of Allah” and burn in Hell (along with most women, apparently). Iqbal Mohamed—who would go on to win Dewsbury & Batley—asked hundreds of worshippers to “follow the teachings of the Prophet” and vote for him. Shabana Mahmood—now the UK’s Lord Chancellor and a distinguished lawyer in her own right—was furious.

“This wasn’t just an assault on us,” she said. “This was an assault on democracy itself. British politics must soon wake up to what happened at this election in Ladywood and a handful of other seats across this country. While it will always be acceptable to disagree passionately it is never acceptable to intimidate and threaten. It is never acceptable to deny anyone their faith, to brand them an infidel,” she continued. “I know what a Muslim looks like. A Muslim looks like me. I know what Muslim values are. Muslim values are mine.”

That there were issues for female candidates in Muslim dominated constituencies was, thankfully, acknowledged. Phillips herself fudged the issue, blaming “men” as a group. Baroness Shaista Gohir, who leads the national charity Muslim Women’s Network UK, was more honest:

I’ve been really concerned observing what has been happening to the female candidates in areas where you have a significant Muslim electorate. Men have also experienced abuse, but it was much greater for women—they are seen as easy targets, they have been intimidated, harassed and that’s really concerning. It’s almost to try to put them off from politics, it’s also sending a message to women not to get into politics. When the dust settles, we have to learn the lessons from this and prevent this from happening again.

When I noted that Reform effectively has six MPs thanks to a Northern Irish interloper, I was inadvertently acknowledging the sheer oddness of Northern Irish politics. Reform isn’t being funny or cute by not running candidates in Ulster—or, alternatively, disclosing a new political party’s lack of organisational chops. Labour and Conservative don’t contest Northern Irish elections either. The reason they don’t has everything to do with historical sectarianism. To quote Bernard Woolley of Yes, Minister fame: “Ireland doesn’t make it any better; Ireland doesn’t make anything any better.”

In the days before devolution sought to confer power on Belfast’s toytown parliament in Stormont, to be appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland was like spending a season in Purgatory. Posh pagan Romans sent to govern the restive monotheistic province of Judaea must have felt similarly, wondering who they’d offended in the Senate. Like ancient Judaea, Northern Ireland is a place of serious and barely repressed sectarian conflict. Keeping the peace there requires an artful blend of compromise and good faith.

Now, you could argue that the colonisation of the Ulster Plantation and surrounding counties was a terrible and immoral mistake, and the (ongoing) Irish border problem is punishment for the sins of our ancestors. The point is, in Rochdale, and then in a dozen more English constituencies at a general election, we have been treated to a taste of ethno-religious, communitarian politics that had once been Northern Ireland’s preserve—a politics known to be corrosive to democracy and its values. And, as with the original Plantation of Ulster, it’s the UK’s immigration policies over many decades under governments of all stripes that invited people to do exactly what they’ve done in the seats “Gaza Independents” now hold.

When the BBC’s Jon Sopel decided to engage in a little light post-general election anti-Americanism—an activity in which he was not alone—it was this reality he occluded. “Does it say something about the diff between US politics and UK that here, one of our main stories is woman pleads not guilty to throwing a milkshake at Nigel Farage,” he asked, “while there it is FBI investigation into the background of a shooter in an attempted assassination of Trump?”

This sort of thing is written by someone with no understanding of sectarianism’s seriousness—of the powder keg of marching season, of jurisdictions throughout the British Commonwealth where Catholics ran the police and Protestants the judiciary, of “mixed families” drafting up elaborate fee tail trust deeds to determine who gets what depending on who marries whom. “Have you forgotten the Troubles?” is a fair question here.

Now that we’ve got the kind of segregated voting you see in Fermanagh and South Tyrone in Birmingham and Leicester, what to do about it? One lesson the people of These Islands should have learnt is that Northern Ireland cannot be governed, solved in law, codified, or otherwise fixed without the consent of the communities living there. The same relentless logic applies to the deprived, heavily Muslim constituencies Labour has lost or is at risk of losing in future.

Thing is, behind Gaza and Islamic grievance politics lies something else, something legitimate. For decades, Labour was the party for Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants. Until 2024, British Muslims rewarded it with astonishing loyalty at the polls, but this support has not brought them widespread prosperity. By contrast, the UK’s non-Muslim (and often market-dominant) minorities—East African Asians, Jews, Chinese—have drifted Tory and LibDem. “[This] is a ghetto, and [Shabana] Mahmood should be ashamed of it,” a Birmingham Ladywood constituent told The Times a month before the general election.

He has a point. The roads of Birmingham Ladywood, Mahmood’s  seat, sweat with traffic and pollution. In the month before polling day, uncollected rubbish, stinking in June’s warm weather, piled up near abandoned, shattered pubs. Voters complained to canvassers from all parties and none about potholes and rat infestations. More than half the children in the constituency, 52.8 per cent, are living in poverty. This is the highest rate for any seat in the country. Birmingham’s Labour-controlled council is not only broke but a national byword for incompetence. It’s reasonable—entirely separately from Israel-Palestine—for many Muslim voters to feel betrayed by a Labour Party that their families have voted for since they came to Britain.

The problem, of course, is that the four MPs elected—and the other half-dozen within striking distance of winning—campaigned near-exclusively on a platform whose chief complaint is a war 3,000 miles away about which His Majesty’s Government can do little except expectorate. “This is for Gaza,” they yelled in victory speeches at their counts.

And here we are.

The post The New Sectarianism appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Throughout, J. K. Rowling tweeted.

On June 3, Farage left his quondam job as telly broadcaster for GBNews and announced a tilt at Parliament. On Tuesday—the same day PM Rishi Sunak and Leader of the Opposition Sir Keir Starmer held the first of several televised debates—a protester threw a McDonald’s banana milkshake over Farage. He was campaigning in Clacton, the Essex constituency he’s targeting.

Despite their best efforts (and that of the British press), top billing went to Nigel’s milkshake, not Rishi and Keir’s telly debate.

Farage’s dramatic entrance brackets off an extraordinary period. Only now the country has passed into election season (our campaigns, as Americans often note, are mercifully short), only now the civil service is in purdah—and nothing happens for six weeks—is it possible to describe a moment of national madness with any equanimity.

Appropriately, the story starts on April Fools’ Day, and of course, it starts with a joke—or, rather, a lot of them. Scotland’s hate crime legislation came into force on that day. One individual (J. K. Rowling) and one corporate entity (Comedy Unleashed) took it on, daring Police Scotland to arrest them. Between those two and the Scottish people, they provided perhaps the first example in modern British history of a law being laughed into desuetude.

Hard cases make bad law, but bad law may be hilarious.

Unlike hate speech legislation—enormously contentious in this country because of the pernicious way it undermines freedom of speech—hate crime legislation is usually safe. In Scots criminal law, adding what’s called “a circumstance of aggravation” to a conviction is accepted and normal, and has been since 1998. Aggravations, note, are not crimes. They apply only when someone commits a crime and while doing so evinces or is motivated by “malice or ill-will” towards a given victim’s protected characteristics (race or sexual orientation, say).

Likewise, “stirring up” offences have been around for decades—since 1965—and haven’t impinged on freedom of speech in the same way, say, as the use of non-crime-hate-incidents by police forces did—until, of course, slapped down by the Court of Appeal.

Part of the problem that emerged on April 1 was rooted in bad drafting: the legislation was enacted only with generic freedom of expression protections. There was no recognition of the poisonous depths to which debate in Scotland had sunk on matters trans, and how, without specific protection, it was easier for activists to trigger police investigations into people with whom they disagreed. Even when courts ultimately throw out vexatious claims, the process is the punishment.

Recall, this issue brought down popular First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and split the wider Scottish independence movement right down the middle. Even Sturgeon’s successor as First Minister, Humza Yusaf, was unable to get a sensible amendment (below) inserted into the legislation, so monstered was he by the trans lobby:

Behaviour or material is not to be taken to be threatening or abusive solely on the basis that it involves or includes discussion or criticism of matters relating to transgender identity.

However, the bulk of the problem—which led, among other things, to people believing that misgendering a trans individual would result in prosecution under the new law—came from the Scottish government and Police Scotland themselves. Not only was public information released to accompany the law focussed almost entirely on hurt feelings (“hate hurts,” various billboards assured us), but Scottish ministers also proved unequal to the task of explaining how their own legislation would work. “It would be up to Police Scotland,” said one, depositing her incomprehension about misgendering at the local constabulary’s feet.

This in turn was compounded by the sort of cack-handed advertising campaign only a mother could love. To teach the world the horrors of hate, Police Scotland devised and then brought into being The Hate Monster, a furry, mascot-like creature looking like a cross between a reject from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and Oscar the Grouch. “Don’t feed me,” it intoned.

For her part, J. K. Rowling chose to respond to the lack of clarity around misgendering, using her enormous Twitter/X presence to dare Police Scotland to arrest her. She described several trans women as men, including convicted criminals, trans activists, and other public figures. “If they go after any woman for simply calling a man a man, I’ll repeat that woman’s words and they can charge us both,” she wrote.

This produced a dramatic climbdown from Police Scotland. No, they assured Scots, Ms. Rowling’s tweets did not reach the criminal threshold. The UK’s funnymen and women proceeded to walk through a fetchingly open door. Andrew Doyle’s Comedy Unleashed outfit hot-footed it to Edinburgh and made the Hate Monster a star. Comedienne June Slater, meanwhile, produced a routine so viral that, among other things, it led to more “hate complaints” about this speech from Yusaf than any of Rowling’s tweets.

Puppeteers and circus performers got in on the act. The Hate Monster in various aspects and versions turned up all over Scotland—even on Greyfriars Bobby. However, as first Scots and then Britons more widely fell about the place laughing and the SNP began to unravel from the top down, Scottish novelist Ewan Morrison stepped forward to point out that the Hate Monster forms part of a ubiquitous and sinister artistic trend.

Known across the pond as “Corporate Memphis” when used in illustration and design, the style features blocky, unrealistic figures with limited features; clashing pastels; enormous, bendy limbs, and blue, green, or purple skin. Morrison calls this flat, unthreatening artwork (beloved of the charitable sector, universities, and now government information campaigns) “cute authoritarianism:”

During the Covid pandemic, the UK’s National Health Service also employed these cute graphics and messaging. Whether or not you support mass vaccination or lockdowns is not the point—these are exercises in population control, and their designers chose cuteness to nudge the public towards desired behaviours. […]

Instead of Get vaccinated now or others will get ill and die! a political nudge will read A shot of love for Valentine’s Day—show how much you care by protecting the people you love from Covid in pink lettering, using the font of international happiness—literally called Alegria (“joy”) style. The public nudge message won’t say Wear a mask now by order of government mandate! but Thank you for masking up. Thanking you for your compliance in advance is an attempt to embarrass you into taking the desired action.

The cloying sweetness Morrison identifies isn’t only present in Corporate Memphis artwork, though. It’s pervasive and appeals to a curdled form of childhood memory. This explains the puppets, colouring books, glitter—or drag queens reading children’s books to toddlers in public libraries.

That most people aren’t terminally online—or into the shite art produced as a side effect of social justice activism—is reflected in a common response to both the Hate Monster and Comedy Unleashed’s mockery of it. “I’ve just discovered that the ‘Hate Monster’ is a real Police Scotland campaign,” historian Adrian Hilton wrote in despair. “I honestly thought it was an invention of Andrew Doyle’s for his Comedy Unleashed event in Edinburgh. I mean, how old do they think people are? With what mental capacity? Absurd infantilisation.”

UK-wide mirth at Scotland’s gender-woo expense meant, when published on April 10, the final Cass Review report had a nuclear impact. Leading NHS paediatrician, Dr. Hilary Cass, and her team at the University of York’s medical school somehow managed to take queer theory’s language (“assigned male at birth” etc.) and its miserable inelegance and use it to make the sensible, phlegmatic, clear analysis (and recommendations) for which British empiricism generally—and the NHS in particular—is famous.

In the process, it emerged that transgender medicine—especially of the paediatric sort—is almost wholly unevidenced. Even more alarming, many practitioners like it that way. One area where there is little data globally concerns the fate of children and young people when they move from paediatric provision to adult clinics. Dr. Cass approached the NHS’s adult gender services; aware they held records on approximately nine thousand patients. All save one refused to hand over patient data, something ministers corrected by executive fiat only after Cass’s final report was published.

Cass also demonstrated in letters a thousand feet high how most of the children who went through the Tavistock—nine thousand of them in all—were same-sex attracted or simply (and this is heart-breaking, because it discloses their ages) gender-nonconforming. Rising numbers, year-on-year, of glittery, swishy little boys and even more sporty but quirky little girls. In February 2020, BBC Newsnight ambushed Graham Linehan over this issue such that he only got one complete sentence out.

Cass vindicated it, and him, in spades.

You don’t tell children they could be born in the wrong body, because they are children, and they will believe you.

Even worse, gender medicine had achieved a false patina of credibility thanks to an extraordinary citation circle jerk. Dr. Cass noted how people and institutions who think “gender-affirming care” is a-okay busily referenced each other’s guidance, ignored anything to the contrary, and so created an appearance of medical consensus. “The circularity of this approach may explain why there has been an apparent consensus on key areas of practice, despite the evidence being poor,” she observed drily.

Once again, Rowling engaged on Twitter, using her reach to ensure something from the NHS—widely admired on the US liberal left—turned up in progressive timelines. One by one, progressive citadels began to pay attention and shift their position: even the New York Times. Rowling’s intervention, with its transatlantic effect, was a reminder that Scotland produces more politics than can be consumed locally. She ensured Cass crossed the pond in part because she’d gone out of her way to build up such a head of critical steam. Police Scotland’s Hate Monster and the country’s wider political dysfunction had already made their way across the Atlantic.

So dedicated was Rowling to ensuring that all the people who’d been avoiding The Truth About Trans got it served up in their eye, she drew Elon Musk’s attention. He proceeded to tell her off for turning into a one-note account, a charge often directed at sex realists on social media.

“While I heartily agree with your points regarding sex/gender, may I suggest also posting interesting and positive content on other matters?” Musk wrote, to which Rowling replied, “Just realized that I missed being advised to share more positive content yesterday … sharing this about my writing life, which happens to have been published today in The Sunday Times, should in no way be interpreted as me doing as I’m told.”

After Rowling, probably the most notable victim of “one-note Twitter account” criticism is Graham Linehan, who people liked and followed back in the day because he was funny. They didn’t take it well when he dispensed with humour: he lost hundreds of thousands of followers and—at one point—his entire Twitter account. The temptation to reel off a series of gags at the expense of those who would silence their opponents over hurty words must have been immense, but Linehan was genuinely alarmed. As he told me late last year, he found that “even people I was extremely close to didn’t seem to understand the issue.” Many folks, having come to love a funny clown, resent it when he removes his suit and makeup and asks to talk seriously with his audience.

Had Rishi Sunak been wearing makeup, the deluge outside Number 10 from where he told the Great British Public there would be a snap election on July 4 (now there’s a date redolent of historical associations) would have washed it off, easily. It does not usually rain hard in the UK (something on which this child of tropical Queensland is qualified to comment), but the Weather Gods made an exception, on May 22, for the Prime Minister. Sunak was drenched. A woman yelling “Tory scum” at him during the announcement struggled to make herself heard over the downpour. Even Larry the No. 10 Cat made himself scarce. 

That a general election had been called did not undermine Rowling’s ability to play Twitter like a fiddle, at least not at first. She used the window before Nigel Farage’s entrance to continue to share material from the Cass Report, highlight gender-critical court victories, and—perhaps most effectively—promote a distinctively Scottish anthology to which she had contributed a piece.

On May 30, The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht was published. It does two things. First, it provides the best explanation I’ve seen of how trans activism, with its irrational beliefs and passion for heresy-hunts, was embraced by Scottish elites. It captures how Scotland’s historically feisty women—especially, but not only, within the pro-independence Scottish National Party—were painted into various corners and told to “wheesht for Indy.” Wheesht in Scots means “hush” or “belt up.” You’re supposed to wheesht when you’re expecting something big, so you don’t spoil it. It’s also said to small children when they’re being precocious. My father stopped using it on me (in the form Will ye not wheesht?) when I was about ten.

Secondly, Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht also documents how one goes about managing a fightback when a country’s institutions have been ideologically captured the way Scotland’s were. Sex-realist Scots produced an extraordinary campaign entirely without institutional support, although they did enjoy Rowling’s spirited and able leadership.

Rowling promoted the book on Twitter and an extract of her piece for it ran in The Times. It took top billing in various bestseller charts and got clear air on news reports until Farage threw his electoral hat in the ring. Rowling continues to intervene, directing considerable ire at Keir Starmer, who she sees (with some justification) as a weathervane. This, of course, won’t save the Tories, in part because the trans lunacy—along with various other lunacies—was allowed to incubate on their 14-year-watch.

Much as Brexit landed Britain not in a constitutional crisis but in a constitutional swamp, the Venn Diagram of “outraged when Christians wanted to ban Harry Potter because of witchcraft” and “let’s ban Harry Potter because Rowling did a wrongthink” is a circle. Meanwhile, government has gone into a state of suspended animation for the general election—all in advance of August’s silly season, where the country snoozes amiably in the summer sunshine, watches cricket, and both schoolchildren and the Westminster Village go on holiday.

“I watched from the sidelines as women with everything to lose rallied, in Scotland and across the UK, to defend their rights. My guilt that I wasn’t standing with them was with me daily, like a chronic pain,” Rowling writes in Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht. “What ultimately drove me to break cover were two separate legal events, both of which were happening in the UK.”

She goes on to describe Maya Forstater’s legal wrangles and Nicola Sturgeon’s downfall-inducing attempt to meddle with gender recognition in Scotland. In that sense, Rowling has put herself at the head of what amounts to major litigation with multiple interveners and amicus briefs. Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht reads like the full name of a famous case when baby lawyers first learn it: J. K. Rowling & Ors v. Gender Woo PLC.

When describing his response to Charles Dickens, George Orwell famously talked of seeing the writer’s face behind the page as he read, say, Hard Times. Not an official portrait, or how posterity remembered Dickens’s appearance. “What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have,” he wrote. Dickens the nineteenth-century liberal had a face of “free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”

There is something of Orwell’s Dickens in Rowling, and not just because she—like he—has become a transatlantic phenomenon. Like Dickens, she loves children and reserves her greatest concern for them. But she will not lie to them, and people who refuse to lie in public these days are indeed hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies now contending for our souls.

The post J. K. Rowling and the Hate Monster appeared first on Law & Liberty.

At the same time, new drugs emerged which are starting to do odd things to civilisation. That they emerged as the world seemed to come unmoored from reality in other respects may turn out to be significant.

In 2020 and 2021, I piled on roughly thirty kilos. That’s sixty-six pounds for the non-metric crowd up the back. I went from being a person who’d never been fat in her life to someone who tipped the scales at a BMI of 33. Thirty, note, is the NHS’s official obesity marker for people of Northern European descent.

Obviously, I ate the food and drank the alcohol that led to the weight gain. Yes, being confined to barracks didn’t help. My partner and I sat outside in 2020’s glorious spring sunshine and enjoyed a daily tipple, listening to unaccustomed birdsong as we drank. I’d cycled long distances for all sorts of reasons on pretty much a daily basis since early primary school, but now had nowhere to go. Other people I know responded differently. Lorenzo Warby—the Australian writer with whom I share a Substack—used the pandemic to burn his excess weight off.

It took me until September 30, 2022, to get sick of being unfit, fat, and immobile. Looking through the retrospectoscope in the eighteen months since then doesn’t reveal a single, obvious moment where I decided enough, although I suspect having to buy trousers in a “big and tall” outlet may have had something to do with it. (If you’re an obese woman who’s also north of six feet, then well-fitted women’s clothes don’t exist.)

I started going to the gym three times a week (with this bloke) and lifting weights in 2022’s Sober October. During 2023, every time the editors of this fine magazine saw me for work reasons, I was notably slimmer.

I’ve now officially lost 39 kg (85.8 lb or 6.13 stone). Lorenzo Warby (my co-substacker) lost 43 kg (94.6 lb or 6.76 stone). I’m the same weight I was in August 2000, when I passed my Shotokan Shodan exam under the direction of Sensei Keinosuke Enoeda. I raise this to emphasise the extent to which my weight gain emerged from the pandemic. I was active and sporty in my youth, willing to challenge myself to achieve difficult physical goals. Lorenzo, by contrast, has spent a lifetime fighting what he calls “the battle of the bulge” and simply got sick of it. Among other things, the pandemic broke his habit of having breakfast in one of Melbourne’s many excellent cafés.

Nonetheless, we both lost our weight the conventional way, using diet and exercise. I mention this because we did so just as Ozempic and Tirzepatide completely upended weight loss methods globally.

I hadn’t realised the extent of the change until I went to Tenerife last month for a blast of winter sun (insert stereotype of Brits and their cold rainy island here), and no-one was fat. Or, rather, people were on the way to not being fat or had already lost the lot. And I mean a lot. Thanks to my own weight loss, I know what loose skin looks like (I have a small amount, kept manageable because I lost weight slowly). I saw people in Tenerife’s high-end resorts who were covered in loose skin, but without surgical scars. Typically, only bariatric surgery produces such extreme effects. I could draw comparisons because I’d visited Tenerife in the same March week last year. At that point, I was halfway through my own weight loss, and there were loads of fatties. I was but one of many.

This is the sort of sociocultural shift that starts at the top and trickles down and has the potential to upend a great deal of what we think we know about human health and productivity. Many of the ex-fat people my partner took to calling “the wrinklies” during our stay had fine figures and a lovely, upright carriage. One got a sense of how they’d looked when young and trim.

From time to time, I’ve wondered why obesity rates are rising globally, including in the developing world. Somewhat incredibly, there are lower and middle-income countries experiencing both an obesity and a malnutrition crisis out there. Mind you, I’ve never had a problem accepting that weight gain generally and obesity specifically often have strong genetic components. Some folk are always going to be fighting the battle of the bulge. This is why the phrase “yo-yo dieting” exists. There’s a difference between people like me who have always been slim before putting on pounds later in life, and people I know at my gym who must rule themselves with a rod of iron to stop the weight creeping back.

However, while I’ve always accepted genes are responsible for human traits and behaviour, I’m aware these traits are responsive to social norms and other environmental factors.

Famously, educational achievement and weight are both about 70 percent heritable. In the 1970s, thirteen percent of Americans graduated from college. Today, it’s 35 percent. In the 1970s, about 13 percent of Americans were overweight. Today, it’s around 70 percent. Americans’ genes did not magically make them brighter and fatter over the last fifty years. The environment changed, making it easier to go to university. Similarly, the environment changed and made it easier to get fat, so more people did. Environmental effects cut both ways, too. Like obesity, tobacco use is highly heritable (60-80 percent) but the percentage of Americans who smoke has dropped by half since 1982. Smoking is being stigmatised out of existence.

Admittedly, the sources and causes of what nutritionists and personal trainers call “our obesogenic environment” are far more complex than what happened to the universities (they simply began to admit large numbers of less intellectually able people as undergraduates).

Despite years of being active and a long-term interest in sporting performance—especially in martial arts—there were new things my post-pandemic health kick taught me. I hadn’t known, for example, that the yo-yo dieter or refractory alcoholic of popular stereotype is by no means universal. Many people lose their weight and keep it off, while about three-quarters of people with alcohol dependency overcome their addiction and later resume drinking without negative consequences. I’d always thought one drink’s too many but a hundred aren’t enough was an alcoholic universal.

That Ozempic and Tirzepatide are reaching the people who genuinely can’t lose weight and keep it off was brought home to me during a conversation with a pharmacist friend. He lets the local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous meet weekly in the office above his shop. A devout Muslim who doesn’t drink, he’s always offered this venue on the basis that it’s unfair to expect alcoholics to meet anywhere near pubs.

“Some of the people with NHS GLP-1 agonist prescriptions come to that meeting,” he told me the other day. “And since they’ve been giving themselves the weekly shots, they no longer want alcohol and don’t need to come to the meeting.”

I thought this was a good thing and said so.

“You must understand how astonishing this is. I am a pharmacist, and a pharmacist is only a slightly fancy chemist. These new drugs can change not only your body chemistry but what goes on between your ears in response to that chemistry. I know you are not a believer, but to me, that is miraculous.”

In other words, Ozempic and Tirzepatide and various newer, less nauseating GLP-1 agonists coming down the pike have the potential to end or seriously curb most or all diseases of human reward systems. By comparison with this, the much-touted wonders of artificial intelligence look like overrated trivia. (Not much has shown signs of being any good: bad writing, alternative facts, and shite art.)

Meanwhile, Novo Nordisk—manufacturer of Ozempic and Wegovy—is in the process of turning Denmark into a pharmaceutical giant with a country attached. Eli Lilly—Novo Nordisk’s main rival when it comes to GLP-1 agonists—is doing something similar with the US state of Indiana.

This represents science solving or at least ameliorating a biological constraint, much like the oral contraceptive and childhood vaccines did. Those things upended not only evolved and universal human constants. They also upended the evolutionary adaptions we’d made in response to lacking control over our fertility or losing roughly half of all children before their tenth birthday.

The ability to take weight off and keep it off is often moralised: people who can’t do it are weak-willed, the argument goes. What Ozempic and Tirzepatide suggest instead is that while it’s reflective of conscientiousness—yet another heritable trait—self-control is not moral-in-itself. Rather, the lack of it makes one more susceptible to being led into acts determined by others. In other words, people don’t lose weight because they’re more moral, or fail to lose it because they’re not.

Relatedly, there’s also a serious problem with suggesting all this scientific and medical innovation is unnatural. Such claims trundle inexorably down the slippery slope to a point where you start arguing against developing a vaccine for the Black Death.

By the same token, biological constraints that the oral contraceptive, childhood vaccines, and GLP-1 agonists ameliorate aren’t oppression. You can’t take up your issues about fertility, pregnancy, lactation, and childbirth with anyone other than Mother Nature, and she’s spent billions of evolutionary years deaf to all cries, not just human ones. Arguing with cholera or polio won’t get you far either. You’re better off preventing both. Seeing biological constraints as oppression—constraints imposed by one’s pre-installed, sexed body, for example—forms a large part of the modern trans movement.

Likewise, a tendency to put on weight isn’t oppression. Like the ability to get pregnant, it comes pre-installed. Modernity has made it easier to enliven the genetic trait, too, which is why so many people are fat. Body positivity campaigns exist in part because they want the rest of us to see the constraint of obesity as a type of oppression.

And then, along comes science and sweeps the constraint aside. 

It’s tempting to slot GLP-1 agonists into a general narrative of technical progress without appreciating how massive a change they will make. The implications are profound.

The post A Turning Point in the Battle of the Bulge appeared first on Law & Liberty.

I wrote about this on my personal Substack last month. There, I drew on the escalating—and global—war of words and deeds over Israel-Palestine. Finally, conservatives and dissenting liberals had found a way to wound the woke and radical left, and they were proceeding to dish it out in spades. Many lefties, who’d never had to mind their Ps & Qs before, fell to bits quite badly in public. Alternatively—as this activist complains—others simply “refused to speak about Palestine” at all.

Well, that’s what happens if you suspect articulating your views will get you sacked. Welcome to the party, pal (with apologies to Bruce Willis).

However, I need not have drawn upon the hour’s global conflict (Ukraine was unceremoniously sidelined last October). I could have used what was—and in some ways still is—going on at Substack to illustrate the world in which we now live. I watched that controversy as it unfolded.

The contretemps started in November last year with this Atlantic article and then made the rounds of the houses on Substack itself and in other outlets. The essence was this: there are Nazi newsletters on Substack. If the company didn’t at least demonetise them, then multiple writers—some of them popular, bearing Substack’s in-house “bestseller” ticks—would leave. Whether anyone has left yet is unclear, although some people have turned off paid subscriptions. Paid subscriptions are, of course, how Substack makes its money.

Without relitigating the minutiae of what took place (and what is probably still unfolding), the logic was depressingly familiar. Nice little newsletter company you’ve got there, Substack. Would be a shame if anything happened to it. People sometimes forget that the ugly fights over which political “side” is perceived to “own” a given social media platform didn’t emerge with Substack. Jack Dorsey’s Twitter went from being “the free speech wing of the free speech party” to an ideologically captured outpost of Woke Inc. Facebook, meanwhile, wound up in protracted fights with national governments over what information could—and could not—be made available on it.

As part of this process, there were multiple attempts from conservatives (and others) to found Twitter and Facebook and YouTube clones, none of which set the world alight. Then—in the wake of Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition and name-change—lefties engaged in identical behaviour and produced a similar nothingburger. Even the presence and financial clout of Donald Trump (Truth Social, on the right) and Mark Zuckerberg (Threads, on the left) have done little to enhance either company’s bottom line.

Twitter and Substack are both network goods. Network goods tend towards monopoly because the bigger the network, the greater the benefit to being in the network, and the cheaper it is to add each new user. That’s why most people who threaten to leave Muskville never do. Both Twitter/X and Substack enjoy significant first-mover advantage, too, although email marketing is as old as the hills, with many modern outlets resembling even older mail-order publications ranging from Readers’ Digest to xeroxed newsletters by your local tabletop wargaming club.

However, the impulse behind the attempt to bully Substack is the same as that animating the current Israel-Palestine Mutually Assured Cancellation: a given social media platform must be brought to political heel. If it refuses to comply, there’s a campaign to injure it, rather than to debate the issue (any issue). Perhaps this is why, in its first weekly “best of” for 2024, Substack featured my piece. It’s awkward to promote commentary about one’s own firm that looks a bit meta and inside baseball, but it’s okay when an outsider makes a useful analogy.

I’m not sure when destroy the opposition took over from debate the opposition, but it undoubtedly has. Substack is, I think, still vulnerable despite rapid growth, which accounts for its somewhat panicked reaction. “Substack’s argument in response to the Atlantic article was a masterclass in how not to do it,” Stephen Bush observed in The Financial Times. “The best way to defeat these ideas, it claimed, was through scrutiny. Frankly, if scrutiny was going to defeat neo-Nazis or the idea that the Cultural Revolution had some upsides, it would have done so already.”

As part of a wide-ranging column where—as European commentators often do—he pointed out that Communism is as murderously destructive as Nazism and should be seen through similarly jaundiced spectacles, Bush also hewed to the older view that “Substack would have been better off not claiming to be a publisher at all.”

The reality is that it hosts a number of publishers, but Substack itself is a service, a handy bit of infrastructure for sending newsletters. … If Substack were a European or British company, the matter would not even arise: both the European Convention’s Article 11, on freedom of association, and even more explicitly the UK’s 2010 Equality Act, place sharp limitations on the ability of businesses or states to discriminate on the grounds of politics.

This, however, is different from the tradition that’s emerged across the Pond and contributes to the way people in Commonwealth countries view censorship. It’s why I have to spend time explaining to Americans—when, for example, interviewing Maya Forstater and Helen Joyce to take one recent example—that in the UK and even more so Australia, the legal status of any given speech utterance is not dependent on whether its speaker is from the public or private sector, or whether governments or private employers are engaging in speech-policing. Yes, there is still censorship: Bush notes “other ways that British and European law is a colder home to free speech than the US.”

The point, however, is that outside the US, speech prohibitions and restrictions of many kinds are construed as censorship: not just those emanating from government.

That means—to a Brit or Australian—Substack’s putative Nazi-hunters are simply doing a corporate version of the campaigns to get disobliging academics and journalists sacked for mean tweets. So far, they’ve failed and embarrassed themselves, but they will not give up. Similar types—maybe even some of the same people—did not give up on Dorsey’s Twitter, eventually hamstringing his company and turning it into a plaything of the FBI and CDC. They were only stymied when it changed hands. Already, I note, there have been approaches to Stripe, Substack’s payments processor—a common ploy when the public-facing organisation refuses to buckle.

One thing distinguishing cancellation of the injure and destroy the opposition type from old school beat the opposition with facts and logic approaches is the way it forces the rest of us to rely on the courts to work out who may or may not speak, and what people may or may not speak about. Precisely because UK and Australian legislation protect employee speech better than the US First Amendment does—to take only one example—gender-critical folk in those countries go through multiple rounds of litigation every time they get sacked for their views, with no sign of let-up.

Last week, academic criminologist Jo Phoenix won a case of exactly this type against her erstwhile employer, the Open University, which finished up with so much egg on its face it managed to wrap itself in a giant omelette during the course of evidence. You’d think universities would learn from this, but at the time of writing, there are many more “Phoenix” cases coming down the pike. One wonders how many lawsuits need to be lost before they get the message. Mutually Assured Cancellation has become so normalised, and putative censors so emboldened, it seems there must be trials before we can have public debates—even in universities. It wouldn’t surprise me if this happens in the US, too, even though that’s not how your system is supposed to work. Given the enormous, national ruckus about anti-Semitic and pro-Palestine speech across the country, surely the First Amendment case from Hell is lurking in there somewhere.

“Please Your Honour/My Lord, what may I say?”

Public debate via litigation, instead of via … debate. Lawyers enjoy professional flattery as much as anyone, but I’m confident that asking us for permission before you want to say something contentious is above our collective pay grade. Frankly, you’d think this would stop because it’s so bloody expensive: I know how much lawyers charge, I am one. Recall, too, how in the UK and Australia, costs go with the event. That means the Open University picking up most or all of Phoenix’s litigation expenses. Sorry, taxpayers.

Substack’s success is clear evidence there’s an enormous hunger for good quality, long-form writing out there. Lots of writers are doing well with it—for the first time in decades. I’m old enough to remember being told by an ad agency boss—in grand and oracular tones—that people “will not pay for content.” It’s nice to see him proven wrong. However, this literary efflorescence will be short-lived if those determined to destroy Substack based on guilt by association get away with it.

I don’t care that there are Commies and Nazis on Substack. I disagree with Freddie deBoer and Richard Spencer—to cite two famous examples—tout court and think they’re full of drivel. I also give exactly zero shits that they’re both on Substack with bestseller ticks. I mean, I have a bestseller tick—they hand them out to all sorts.

When forming this view, I did wonder if I held it because I’m not Jewish or Ukrainian, making both right and left political extremisms seem more distant. Then I thought, hang on, I’m homosexual. There are loads of people on Substack who bang on about “Globohomo” all the time and I don’t care about them either. Suggest the following to fellow members of the first against the wall club: get over yourselves.

Cancel culture is not only real. It’s pervasive, now part of the developed world’s standard political toolkit. Individuals and corporate entities are in its crosshairs everywhere, depending on who’s sitting closest to the YOU’RE FIRED lever. Meanwhile, the rest of us are coming to depend on the courts to let us know when and how we should speak.

The post Permission to Speak appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Various party people tried to convey to me the calamitous nature and effect. I’m afraid I struggled to believe them. Nothing could be that bad, I thought, especially given US Congresscritters are far politer than UK Commons MPs or—to make the contrast even starker—Australia’s by turns amusing and spittle-flecked parliamentarians.

When I did finally see it—24 hours later—it seemed I was watching Australia’s Senate Estimates, except the accents were all wrong. An attack-dog politician in the Australian style was going after three university vice-chancellors (what we call university presidents) who were making an absolute meal of their testimony. Kids these days say “cringy” or “cringeworthy,” but I prefer my mother’s phrase: toe-curlingly embarrassing.

I started to wonder if it were made so ruinous because we could all see their faces. There was a moment there, with the Penn woman’s awful gurning—her mouth twisting into a smile—where I wanted to pick up a corner of the carpet and crawl underneath. It was almost unwatchable. I concluded the visuals were making it worse—gurning is something done for shits and giggles at parish fairs in the North of England—and hunted down a BBC Radio 4 report on the controversy which, of necessity, was audio-only.

I was wrong. Even without video, it’s just as awful.

Since then, I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind’s eye. I don’t think there’s any coming back from that. This is how an institution’s social licence is lost. It reminded me of the infamous big tobacco hearing where major cigarette manufacturers straight up lied to Congress about the link between smoking and cancer.

I understand and respect the people making serious and thoughtful policy suggestions designed to “fix” the Ivy League and US higher education more widely. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has a useful laundry list for starters, while attorney and legal academic Glenn Reynolds has ideas that overlap with FIRE’s plus a few bonus proposals of his own. I’ve selected those two out of hundreds because they both understand that when you censor any speech, you then make yourself responsible for whatever speech you do allow. Blind Freddy can see your double standards and is often happy to hold you to them—as angry alumni and donors queuing up to lob rocks at the Ivies show.

However, respect for FIRE and Reynolds—and my belief that implementing the policies they advocate would be beneficial for Americans, so please do them for your country’s sake—does not mean they’ll “fix” your universities. The universities are like big tobacco: they’re never going to be good places full of good people, and you need to accept that. No matter how much you enjoy them, cigarettes will kill you. The universities’ number is in the process of coming up.

“How?” I hear you ask. “Harvard alone has an endowment north of fifty billion dollars.”

Well, I live in a country that once had institutions many times richer (in relative terms) than Harvard, Penn, or MIT. And in four short years—1536 to 1540—all of them had passed into history. Attempts to revive them at the highest level less than 20 years later failed. I speak, of course, of Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. As with the monasteries, if Harvard annoys the people of your country enough—especially your wealthy elites—then its 50-billion-dollar endowment will not save it.

By the time the sixteenth century rolled around, English religious houses of varied sorts controlled appointment to about two-fifths of all parish benefices in England, disposed about half of all ecclesiastical income, and owned a quarter of the nation’s landed wealth. When Thomas Cromwell (Henry’s enforcer; he led the so-called “visitations”) established how much money monasteries had in 1535, it turned out that, had the Abbot of Glastonbury married the Abbess of Shaftesbury, their heir would have more land than the King. Of England’s adult male population at the time—approximately half a million—one in fifty were in religious orders. With only a handful of exceptions, England’s best-educated and brightest women were all nuns.

Of course, the schoolgirl stories I was taught about England’s monastic dissolutions are at least partly true: Henry VIII was notoriously broke and never a genuine Protestant in a way, say, Martin Luther would recognise. His religious policies were often incoherent. Famously—in 1537—he founded a new monastery to pray for his wife Jane Seymour’s soul (while continuing to dissolve monasteries hither and yon). The old gag that the Church of England sprang out of a sexually profligate monarch’s jockstrap has something to it. 

Whether a given monastery was held in contempt or considered a worthy institution depended on the role it had played locally. If it gave out poor relief, educated local children, participated in regional markets, and provided spiritual services, it tended to be beloved. It was inwardness, unworldliness, and failure to engage with society—while taking people’s money in tithes—that did many of them in. If you don’t share, we won’t support was a real gripe of long standing.

Locking away both human and economic capital never goes down well, and resentment was not unique to England and Wales or Reformation Europe: it arose in other civilisations with their own monastic traditions. In 843, China’s Tang Dynasty Emperor Wuzong—like Henry VIII, short of cash—dissolved his country’s Buddhist monasteries. He began by ending their tax-exempt status. Also like Henry, he probably didn’t start the process intending to extirpate all monasticism, but that’s what it became. His 845 edict is thunderous:

Buddhist monasteries daily grew higher. Men’s strength was used up in work with plaster and wood. Men’s gain was taken up in ornaments of gold and precious stones. Imperial and family relationships were forsaken for obedience to the fees of the priests. The marital relationship was opposed by the ascetic restraints. Destructive of law, injurious to mankind, nothing is worse than this way. Moreover, if one man does not plough, others feel hunger; if one woman does not tend the silkworms, others go cold. Now, in the Empire, there are monks and nuns innumerable. All depend on others to plough that they may eat, on others to raise silk that they may be clad.

It’s important to remember that the Dissolutions—while based on real grievances—utterly rent England’s social fabric. It’s not something I’d wish on any country. In one area where religious houses were loved and supported, it led to serious popular revolt: the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace started in Yorkshire and soon spread to other Northern counties. Robert Aske, leader of the Pilgrimage, testified that “the suppression of abbeys was the greatest cause of the said insurrection,” pointing out that Northern religious houses “gave great alms to poor men and laudably served God.”

There’s also evidence that English civilisation was developing different social arrangements from what had obtained previously. Many had come to believe resources expensively deployed on an unceasing round of services by men and women set apart from the world would be better spent on training people who would then serve the laity.

Wealthy people were already directing moneys towards Oxford and Cambridge, grammar schools for pupils of all ages, and the Inns of Court. The great religious houses, however, thought they were safe from this civil society shift: after all, they had their vast endowments. Typically, their eleventh- and twelfth-century founders had endowed them with both “temporal” income in the form of revenues from landed estates, and “spiritual” income in the form of tithes appropriated from parish churches under the founder’s patronage. Who cared if the local Lord had changed his mind about a nearby abbey’s value? The money, as it were, was already in hand.

When it comes to US universities and their endowments, we have been here before.

There’s another element in common, too: shared beliefs in and promotion of rank superstition. One theological point on which Henry agreed with both Thomas Cromwell and Cromwell’s intellectual influencers (Desiderius Erasmus and Luther) was that monasteries were riddled with superstitio.

Superstitio is not a nice word in either Classical or Ecclesiastical Latin. Pagan Roman critics of early Christianity called the new kid on the religious block superstitio. Unlike other Classical Latin words—as sometimes happened once the language ceased to be a spoken one—superstitio did not change its meaning. It remained shorthand for bonkers religious nonsense with emotionally incontinent roots.

In 1535, what was the substantive content of Cromwell’s superstitio as found in the monasteries? Fake relics and fake miracles—and pointless pilgrimages to see both—designed to empty credulous people’s pockets. Cromwell inveighed against superstitio from the outset: “They shall not show no relics or feigned miracles for increase of lucre.”

Claudine Gay, Elizabeth Magill, and Sally Kornbluth didn’t turn up trying to sell Elise Stefanik a piece of the True Cross or an ampoule of San Gennaro’s blood, but they may as well have. They believe things—as their testimony and behaviour both before and since shows—that are vacuous nonsense, rooted in emotionally incontinent wibble. They’ve adopted a tendentious definition of racism that blinds people to injustices against any group seen as dominant. They’ve divided the world into simplistic categories of oppressors and oppressed, of whites and people of colour, of colonisers and colonised. They’ve concluded discrimination is justified on behalf of the marginalised. They think “my truth” can be substituted for “the truth.”

Worse, much of the worst drivel was developed by female and minority authors who, sadly, have been praised far above and beyond their actual talent by people who should know better in often mortifying cases of head-patting and humouring. Like Samuel Johnson, they think “a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Unlike Johnson, they exalt all attempts—including risible ones—to the skies. This, in case it isn’t obvious, does not help women or minorities.

I don’t know what’s going to become of the universities—in the US or elsewhere, for that matter. We live in a world with much bigger, more powerful states and staggering wealth compared to that of Tudor England. We can afford more parasitic institutions. Henry VIII and Emperor Wuzong couldn’t. Whatever does happen will be messy.

There are also differences of degree, if not kind, within the university set: the US’s public universities come out much better in FIRE’s free speech rankings than the posh Ivies and equivalently posh non-Ivies, for example. Maybe they’ve earnt a contemporary Pilgrimage of Grace. Meanwhile, the Ivies may have commoners steal all their gold plate, rare books, and Italian altarpieces.

In 1553, Bloody Mary began a valiant but unsuccessful effort to bring about a revival in English monastic life. When she died in 1558 and was succeeded by her half-sister, Elizabeth I, the new queen offered Mary’s Westminster monks the opportunity to remain in place if they took the Oath of Supremacy and conformed to the new Book of Common Prayer. All refused and were dispersed without pensions.

There had been monasteries in England since the sixth century. In less than 20 years, the country’s monastic impulse was extinguished. Word to the universities: nothing lasts forever.

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Australia Day—the country’s national holiday—was labelled “Invasion Day.” Australia was “occupied.” People who’d immigrated were called “settler-colonials” or just “colonists.” Indigenous Australians (their collective nouns kept changing) were “oppressed.” At first—catching it out of the corner of my eye, busy while life made other plans—I thought this was boiler-plate racism. Someone didn’t like the large number of immigrants from all over the world who’d come to the country after WWII.

I did a double take when I realised this was directed at everyone who’d pitched up since 1788, and it was emanating from (mostly) white academics and (mostly) indigenous Australians. I thought it alienating nonsense that would undermine public support for any proposed reforms to the country’s indigenous policies. On October 14 this year, when the Australian people had their say on one such proposal—as is required for any change to the Constitution—it became clear my instincts were right.

Australia’s indigenous advocates and activists (there are two native groups, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders) didn’t use to sound like that. As part of wider civil rights campaigns, they’d developed a shared vision of Australian citizenship that identified common national goals, and which was genuinely persuasive.

The last time Australia had a referendum on indigenous issues—in 1967, when the Constitution was changed to remove two racist provisions—more than 90 per cent of the electorate voted YES. Then, voters were asked to approve changes to two provisions in the Constitution: section 51 (xxvi) and section 127.

Section 51 begins:

The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:

The clauses that follow (referred to as “heads of power”) list the federal parliament’s legislative competencies. The amendment deleted the text in italics from subsection xxvi (known as the “race” power):

The people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.

Section 127 was removed entirely. Headed “Aborigines not to be counted in reckoning population,” it had read:

In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.

The Voice to Parliament

Australia is a proud constitutional bowerbird. A Westminster system with a bicameral parliament, the country also enshrines a federalism so intense it shocks many Americans. It’s possible for an individual state to vote (by referendum) to secede, for example, something that once happened. Australia also—when drafting constitutional arrangements in the late nineteenth century—copied the Swiss when it comes to changing its founding document.

Section 128 provides that the Constitution can only be amended by referendum. It also requires a “double majority”: a majority of the total population plus a majority in at least four of the six states. The two lightly populated territories also vote, but their ballots only go towards the national total.

The proposed amendment to the Constitution voted down on October 14 this year would have added the following Chapter and section:

Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice

In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:

(1) there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;

(2) the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;

(3) the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.

Australia has now had 45 referendums since Federation in 1901, for a meagre harvest of eight changes to its Constitution. The Voice to Parliament was voted down even more comprehensively than the proposed Republic was in 1999. It lost in every state and one of the country’s two territories. At time of writing (the count isn’t quite complete), under 40 per cent of Australians voted YES. If it were possible to kill it any deader, it’s difficult to see how.

Australia: An Odd Duck

If John Locke is the father of the US Constitution and John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith the fathers of British approaches to governance, then Australia’s dad is Jeremy Bentham, the bloke who described natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts.” He rejected the idea of natural or divinely given rights preceding the establishment of state authority, arguing that rights are creations of law, and without government there are none. Rights, in other words, come from states.

The contrast with John Locke is immediate and obvious: for Locke, individuals and their rights come first, and government comes afterwards. The state for Americans is a bottom-up creation where citizens transfer to it by social contract only so much authority as is strictly necessary for mutual benefit and protection.

Most importantly, where the US favours liberty and rights over democracy and majorities, Australia favours democracy and majorities over liberty and rights. To this day, the country has no bill of rights, and what rights do exist (usually at the state level in a federal system) are simple acts of parliament that can be repealed by a subsequent government.

In other words, Australian legal and political culture is in some ways the anti-US: it doesn’t think rights drop fully formed from the sky. They must, to some degree, be earned—negotiated for with the wider polity.

Aware that Bentham’s approach to institutions tended to produce electorates that saw the nation-state as a vast public utility, Australians put immense care into designing the country’s institutional arrangements and electoral system. There is little beautiful rhetoric in the late nineteenth-century constitutional debates of its Framers—a notable contrast to the American equivalent. There is, however, astonishing attention to detail and a willingness to pinch good things from other countries and civilisations. An obsession with policy detail still forms a major part of Australian governance.

Onto this was bolted several Australian innovations: compulsory registration and compulsory voting; voting on Saturdays; an incorruptible system of postal votes; equal-sized constituencies whose redistricting was managed by an impartial electoral authority; preferential voting (“instant run-off” and “alternative vote” to Americans and Brits) blended with what is now called Single Transferable Vote; a secret ballot where—unlike the Roman and related systems—electors did not bring their pre-filled ballot to the polling station, but a state official gave them an unmarked, pre-printed one before they entered the voting booth.

This extraordinary regime began to emerge around 1860 and was complete by 1924. Even many Australians do not appreciate the extent to which it is a logistical marvel, more so given it was developed and perfected in a country with huge distances, heavy reliance on transport by bullock trains or pony and trap, and, for some of the period, no telegraph. It is the foundation of what economists call Australia’s “high state capacity”—roughly, the ability to get shit done—and is not easy to reproduce. This is not only because it is hard but because it involves thinking about politics in a different way, chiefly by rejecting US and EU “rights-talk” and Lockean social contract theory.

Voting in referendums is also compulsory. Australians vote a lot. Elections—always held on a Saturday—are beautiful, carnivalesque celebrations of democracy. Australians stream out of their houses, buy snacks and drinks (including the famous “democracy sausage”) at polling places (often primary schools), collect glossy how-to-vote cards—advisory only—from booth-workers who stand outside and represent different political parties, and then vote in a spirit of general bonhomie.

Nonetheless, this is a country that takes democracy very seriously, despite light-hearted photos of people voting in budgie-smugglers and bikinis flashing around the world after every poll.

Growing the Blob

Because it has no bill of rights, Australian governance has not been undermined by civil or human rights jurisprudence. There is, in Christopher Caldwell’s terms, no “law that ate the Constitution.” This means the Executive government…executes.

Unlike the situation elsewhere, in Australia a piece of legislation (Caldwell aims his ire at various US civil rights enactments) is not enough. A hostile parliament will simply repeal it or abrogate the international convention on which it is based. Australia has abrogated the Refugee Convention, for example, one of the reasons its immigration policy is so successful.

To grow an Australian administrative state blob (in UK, EU, or US terms) requires constitutional amendment. Something needs to be put into the country’s founding document that can’t be removed, around which a bureaucracy can accrete. The Voice was just that sort of proposal. The Australian people saw it for what it was, and rejected it.

The Voice’s stated aim was to remedy the serious and ongoing disadvantage experienced by Australia’s indigenous people, something about which Australians are sensitive given their country’s extraordinary prosperity. When first proposed in September last year, YES polled between 60 and 70 per cent. Labor PM Anthony Albanese thought he was onto a winner: voting against it would be like Americans voting against motherhood and apple pie.

However, as time passed, support drained away. Some of this was Albanese’s (and Labor’s) fault: they took control of the campaign and micromanaged it to suit themselves, most notably by abandoning any idea of a constitutional convention or bipartisan parliamentary process. Bipartisan support is necessary but not sufficient for an Australian referendum to pass. Albanese also refused to disclose the architecture for the Voice: that is, set out how it would function post-referendum.

Lawyers often argue that Parliament can be trusted to establish something like this after in-principle approval at the ballot box. You can point to provisions in many constitutions which give legislatures power to enact on numerous subjects without spelling out what relevant laws will say. But we live in a time when trust in politicians is low. In 1967’s referendum—among other things—the Australian people gave the federal government greater legislative scope in an area known to be difficult. Those generous days, alas, are gone.

As public support fell, the YES campaign—in a pattern that will be familiar to those who remember 2016 in the UK—also began to reek of both condescension and victimhood. It seemed to believe anyone not convinced was a cretin. This petulance has become worse since the poll, giving off proper Continuity-Remain, only-racists-voted-Leave fumes. There’s even been talk of Russian disinformation, forgetting that by the end of the campaign, YES construed every argument against the Voice as not merely wrong but deliberate duplicity.

The Australian Settlement v. Decolonisation

One effect of the ideological shift I noticed twenty years ago was the acceptability of arguments for exclusions and advantages based on minority ethnic ancestry, first among academics and then among the activists academics sought to influence.

This required adopting a tendentious definition of racism that blinds people to injustices against any group seen as dominant. Dividing the world into simplistic categories of oppressors and oppressed, of whites and people of colour, of colonisers and colonised, decolonisation concludes that discrimination is justified on behalf of the marginalised. True to its left-progressive roots, it also claims the state can simply allocate good outcomes from above without those on the receiving end adopting successful life strategies.

This imported ideology ran smack-dab into the intensely democratic and egalitarian Australian settlement and its distinctive electoral and constitutional arrangements. To the Great Australian Public, the Voice looked like a plan to confer political powers on people based on their race. In 1967, Australians showed a strong desire to remove race from the Constitution. In 2023, they were asked to reinsert it in the form of a body where the qualification for membership was something other than Australian citizenship.

Aware that this was NO’s strongest argument, YES tried to rebut it by pointing out that there is only one human race, which means distinctions based on race can’t exist. The distinction, YES claimed, is one only of ancestry, and refers to “inherent rights Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples hold as the original inhabitants of the Australian continent.”

Lawyers call this sort of argument “trivially true.” No, biological race does not exist among humans. We are not genetically distinct enough. Chimpanzees possess biological race (biologists use the term “subspecies”). However, Aboriginal ancestry in even tiny amounts stands out in a genetic test. The YES claim that the Voice wouldn’t be chosen by voters distinguished from the rest of the electorate by race looked like legerdemain. Descent from the First Peoples of Australia (a real thing) was being used to draw distinctions between groups in the same way that nineteenth-century racists drew distinctions based on race (not a real thing).

It also led to a situation where those who voted against a proposed law intended to distinguish between groups of Australians based on ancestry and cultural practice were accused of racism. I am not that old, and I can remember when dividing a country’s population into ethnic groups and applying different rules to them on that basis was the sine qua non of racial prejudice.

A week before Australia’s referendum, the world and his wife witnessed not only Hamas’s atrocities but also the way decolonising academics and organisations responded. “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” I doubt this had any effect on Australia’s referendum outcome: polling support for the Voice had already cratered.

Yet, after the referendum, YES not only stigmatised NO voters as racist and ignorant but intensified its “decolonial” rhetoric. There was no violence, but I did wonder what would happen to vocal NO voters if YES had won at the polls, or if the result had been close. This is why I think Australia not only dodged a bullet for itself but has done the world a favour. An entire country rejected the idea that historically disadvantaged people are entitled to extra civil rights over and above those held by those they consider their oppressors.

Australia said NO: perhaps there is life in the old liberal democratic dog yet.

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