How Elon Musk killed Twitter/ X

Twitter was a newswire. That, at least at first, was the point of it. Something that came with all the glamour of digital innovation was, as it turned out, immediately recognisable as a version of something that has sat on every newspaper news desk for decades: a regularly refreshed ‘feed’ of short updates, ceaselessly scrolling, with the latest at the top.

It was a newswire everybody got, and everybody could contribute to. There was value in that alone. It turned into much more. It became a raucous sort of community. It did, as everybody complained, make it easier for angry inadequates to shout at strangers, but that was just part of it. It was fun. If you wanted to identify that unusual bird’s egg, or settle a dispute about Jacobean handwriting, or canvass ideas on how to get a sponge out of the bottom of a decanter, or immediately share something that struck you as funny to an audience that might find it funny too, Twitter was a place to do it. If you used good manners, too, there was a decent chance that you’d be able to interact – even glancingly – with very famous people you admired. Nigella Lawson might descend from the Empyrean to settle a dispute about lentil bolognese.

It was fun, and it was also useful. It allowed information (and, yes, disinformation) to propagate very quickly. If there was a fast-moving story, there was nowhere better to follow it than on Twitter. Reporters of, witnesses to and even participants in events would keep Twitter posted in real time. For a while, if you wanted to follow American politics, the only way to keep up with what was going on in the President’s head was to check his Twitter feed.

I am aware of the dangers of media folk like me banging on about Twitter. It’s a besetting sin of people who are on Twitter to think of it as more important than it is. But (circularly) that made it important. It was important. A lot of traditional media people used it (because it was a newswire, so they knew what to do with it), and that meant a lot of traditional media people occasionally mistook it for the world they were supposedly reporting on.

At its worst, that created an echo chamber where the same few thousand people saw something on Twitter, repeated it, saw the others repeating it, wrote it down in their various media outlets as if it was happening in the real world, and then went onto Twitter to amplify the reporting because – look, it made it into a mainstream media outlet. But at its best, it really was the closest thing we’ve yet had to a global marketplace of ideas and information. Its users referred to it jocularly as ‘this hellsite’, but they loved it, and they stayed.

I come not to praise Twitter, though, but to bury it. Because since Elon Musk took it over, it has gone to worms. I don’t make this complaint because I abhor his enthusiasm for interacting with MAGA (Make America Great Again) shitposters and pushing pro-Putin talking points. Many people will, but that’s just the free speech he’s so vocal about being keen on. The problem seems to be that in attempting – which is of course fair enough – to service the vast debt he took on in acquiring it, he has systematically removed the things that made Twitter useful, and the things that made it fun.

In the first place, the angry-inadequates-shouting-at-strangers thing has moved from the margins to the centre. It has become the business model. ‘Engagement-farming’ now more than ever means hate-clicks and rage-clicks. Blue-tick ‘verification’ – originally a means of helping users know who they were interacting with, and boosting the visibility of those who were likely to have some reason to be notable – was anyone’s for a monthly subscription.

Well-informed and thoughtful tweets from people who have something to say can still reach an audience, but the playing field is steeply tilted in favour of the know-nothing with a chequebook. Professional and personal networks have frayed into invisibility. Of course, there’s no reason that someone supplying a valuable service (and losing money while doing it) isn’t entitled to find a way of charging people to use it. But the way in which this has been done actively reduces the value of the service to its ordinary users. It distorts the flow of information through the system.

The algorithm now not only disproportionately rewards fear and loathing, but Twitter pays those who are good at producing it by sharing ad revenue. When a young liberal activist was randomly murdered in the street in Brooklyn a week ago, the reactions that went viral were the ones gigglingly suggesting that it served him right for being ‘woke’. Over the weekend, as horrors unfolded in Israel, the feeds of ordinary Twitter users filled with the hot takes of Western bigmouths who thought Israel deserved it (in the form, perhaps, of the teenage civilians on whose bloody corpses Hamas terrorists were filmed spitting); and the people whose outraged responses amplified those repulsive hot takes.

The now cliched Yeats line about the best lacking all conviction while the worst are full of a passionate intensity has acquired a new twist. Under Elon Musk, the worst can make bank. As the Bloomberg writer Dave Lee put it in a recent column on ‘The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging with Elon Musk’s X’:

‘X is now an app that forcibly puts abhorrent content into users’ feeds and then rewards financially the people who were the most successful in producing it, egging them on to do it again and again and make it part of their living.’

The second problem is that it would be just about possible to get behind Mr Musk’s proud self-description as a free-speech absolutist – were it not that tweets critical of him personally, of his company Tesla, or of political positions he favours appear to have been covertly and opaquely downgraded, with ‘likes’ disappearing, users’ handles inexplicably vanishing from search results, and visibility being quietly throttled. A global marketplace of ideas where the biggest stallholder has his thumb on the scales isn’t one most of us would like to trade in.

The third and final problem is a purely practical one. You can argue that ‘legacy blue ticks’ are just snobs for complaining that ‘subscription verified’ users get more visibility. You can argue that rage and hate have always driven engagement and that clicks are clicks and that’s where the money is. But Twitter – sorry, X – used to be great because if nothing else you could see people posting links to news stories. No longer. Now – again, presumably because forcing people to click is a revenue stream – whenever a user posts a link to a story it comes stripped of any text. There’s no headline, no byline, no subhead; no nothing. Just a photograph and the name of the news outlet. Lucky dip.

We have, in other words, a newswire that doesn’t work as a newswire. Not that it matters a bit, but I’m out. And, which may matter a bit, I’m very far from the only one. Shame. It was good while it lasted.  

Labour’s plan to save the NHS – on a budget

Wes Streeting interprets his job as shadow health secretary as being a ‘public service role and an economic role’. ‘There is a direct relationship between the health of the nation and the health of the economy,’ he told a Policy Exchange event at the Labour party conference on Monday. Echoing the sentiment of his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, Streeting makes clear that while a Labour government would work to preserve the health service, it would approach NHS funding with iron discipline. And it doesn’t really seem like Labour would have much other choice. As one Tory MP remarked during the Conservative party conference: ‘What can Labour offer? They can’t offer more money – because we’ve spent it all!’

Resurrecting the NHS is possible, Streeting believes, and it isn’t about altering the funding system. He was careful about his language; rather than ‘reform’, Streeting eased into the conversation by discussing the need to ‘rewire the way we do healthcare in this country’. ‘There is huge waste and inefficiency built into the way that our model of care is structured,’ he said. From an inadequate level of diagnostic testing to late-stage treatment to the high prevalence of chronic disease and an ageing population, the shadow health secretary didn’t attempt to sugarcoat the challenges facing the health service: ‘We’ve got a fundamental existential crisis for the future sustainability of the system.’

But would a Labour government have all the answers – especially if Streeting would rather focus on ‘rewiring’ than rethinking the funding structure? His solutions can be clumped into ‘three big shifts’. The first is a move away from an ‘excessive focus on acutes’ (hospital patient care) to primary care in the community, like general practice. This isn’t a particularly new way of thinking: NHS England set out a ‘five year forward view’ plan in 2014 that focused on expanding and improving GP services across the country and directing patients to other community health workers, like pharmacists.

Yet particularly since the pandemic, general practitioners have faced extraordinary backlogs and patients are more likely to attend A&E if the alternative is to wait for an appointment. While not altogether original, Streeting’s focus on primary care is welcome. An NHS update in 2017 foreshadowed the stagnation the health service is currently facing, reporting that ‘general practice is undeniably the bedrock of NHS care… if general practice fails, the NHS fails.’ So if a Labour government were to pull the country’s flailing primary care services back to their feet, does it then follow that it could prevent the desecration of the NHS? At the moment, Streeting’s big ideas need a little more detail.

Streeting’s second shift would be from analogue to digital; in essence, bringing the NHS into the 21st-century. His third is more broad: to focus, as a government, on the social determinants of health — on things like housing, working conditions, education and unemployment. There are echoes of Steve Barclay’s vision in here: the current health secretary spoke at Tory conference about the need to catch disease early and focus on preventative medicine. Streeting had no kind words for his Tory counterpart, however: ‘If I had been as negligent and complacent as Steve Barclay, I don’t think I would be in a job with the Prime Minister.’

Would Streeting have better luck with striking doctors then? He is thought to get on well with the BMA, though admitted that the general public’s sympathies are less likely to lie with striking consultants than cleaners and porters. Addressing Rishi Sunak’s recent comments that striking healthcare workers were putting ‘politics before patients’, Streeting criticised the Prime Minister for pursuing a ‘deliberate strategy’ where he would rather ‘scapegoat NHS staff’ than ‘provide a solution to the strikes’. Labour’s shadow health secretary was, however, careful not to put a figure on what he would offer striking medics across the country. 

His solution to the workforce crisis is to offer up more medical school places – to British students, in particular. It’s ‘wonderful’ that the ‘children and grandchildren of the Windrush generation now proudly work in the NHS’, Streeting said, ‘but it shouldn’t come alongside turning away straight-A students from studying medicine at university because we’ve been too short-sighted to provide the places for 13 years.’ Yet as too many of Britain’s doctors continue to leave for Australia, the issue of staff retention remains an issue Streeting hasn’t fully addressed.

Reading between the lines, it’s clear that the shadow health secretary is trying to gradually shift the public discourse around the NHS. Streeting wants to make the prospect of reform more palatable — despite the language on health service improvements becoming ever more politicised. ‘The relationship between the Treasury and the department of health and social care and NHS England has been terrible for years now,’ Streeting told his audience. ‘There’s a reform element and you’re not going to get anything for free from me or Rachel Reeves.’

Streeting is young, energetic and, most importantly, presents a change. His vision sounds reasonable and his ambitions pragmatic. He is hyperaware of the need to manage expectations. The NHS is a sacred institution in the UK and the idea of reform remains controversial. Streeting appears determined to save the NHS with a mix of common sense and tight pursestrings but he has a long road ahead of him if Labour is successful — one that will certainly require more than five years’ work.

The joy of shaving brushes

Have you ever considered the harm that men’s daily shaving regime does to the world? I know, if you considered the harm of everything you do on a daily basis then none of us would get up in the morning, but…

Think of it: assuming there are three billion men in the world who each day squirt a dollop shaving foam onto their faces and each, therefore, working their way through something like four or five aerosols of shaving foam a year. All told, that means that in the region of 15 billion cans of foam are used (just for men, as the commercials, say), a proportion of which may be recycled or failing that sent to fill huge holes in Canvey Island or Turkmenistan.

Fortunately, instead of Taliban-style enforced beard-growing, there is another greener solution. It’s called the shaving brush. I know it sounds radical. In fact, it’s so radical that it’s been around in its modern form since the 1750s when the French, inventors of all cruelty to animals, decided to introduce badger hair into the gentleman’s daily morning ritual. It was a stroke of genius.

And yet, like many things in the course of the long, throw-away years of the 20th century, we’ve forgotten them. Not all of us, but most of us. Most men under 50 or 60, I would wager, have never felt the luscious sweep of a badger brush across their faces.

Well, I have now, and I can tell you that I have seen the light. I now know why God created badgers: they were not put on the earth to keep down the populations of earthworms and birds, frogs and lizards; nor were they invented to stimulate the fecund minds of children’s authors – or employ the sublime talents of actors like Michael Hordern. Nor were they put here to give motorists guilt-free target practice on A-roads.

First, consider the sterile joylessness of expelling cold, greasy gel from an aerosol into your hand – and then the fumbled smearing as you attempt to attach it to your face before it falls off in lumps to the floor. Your razor then slides through this cold film on your face, leaving your skin feeling like a piece of baked chicken you’d find under the foil of an inflight meal.

Where brushes stimulate the follicles on your face and gives you what amounts to a massage at the same time. The feeling of proper soapy cream lathered on your face, warmed by a brush loaded with hot water, is a joy. The indecently simple combination of a brush with shaving cream, dabbed from a pot, is positively luxurious, a luxury that doesn’t cost a fortune – nor indeed the earth. Do it and it makes the prospect of the early morning hiss of the foam from a can about as appealing as microwaved scrambled eggs.

Yes, it’s a bit of a throwback, but it’s a throwback to something better. I started with a bamboo brush with synthetic bristles from Bull Dog which cost £8, and their shaving soap in a wooden pot, for £12, bought at a local Boots. That was good, so good I upgraded, buying some shaving cream – which gives a better lather and feels more moisturising than soap – from Taylor of Old Bond Street. And after that, I soon realised that I had to reach for the badger and go full Phileas Fogg, so I bought one of their ‘super badger brushes’ (top quality in other words) and that has ever so slightly changed my life for the better.

So do it today, I say. Don’t be an aerosol. Go the full badger and I promise, you won’t look back. Think of the massive hole in the ground that you’ll be helping to save, not to mention all those joyless shaves that you’ll be avoiding, too.

The sweet temptation of scrumping

In autumn when apples cascade off the trees and bedeck the orchard’s floor with fields of red and gold, thoughts naturally turn to an ancient survival instinct: foraging – or, as we tend to call it in my part of the world, scrumping. Yet although scrumping seems as English as Shakespeare, conker fights and Bonfire nights, it is quite a recent word borrowed from the Middle Dutch schrimpen, meaning shrivelled (or perhaps a derivation of the verb ‘to scrimp’).

When sugar was scarce in medieval times, fruit was an obsession and the autumn harvest closely guarded. Not just apples either. There is the Chaucerian medlar in the Reeve’s Tale:

A fruit which is rotten before it is ripe
Unless I fare like medlar, all perverse
For that fruit’s never ripe until it’s worse.

Medlars, though seemingly like apples but really roses, are often a coded reference for fallen women. Once the medlars have bletted – a stage beyond normal ripening – and the juice filtered and set firm, it becomes a fine ruby red jelly, a grand accompaniment for roast lamb or venison.

Shakespeare mentions not only medlars but crab apples ‘When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl’, a reference to Wassail in Love’s Labour Lost. And ’crab trees’ make an appearance in Coriolanus, Henry VI and Henry VIII. Then there is Lear’s fool ‘She’s as like this as a crab’s like an apple’ and in Romeo and Juliet Mercutio comes to the point. ‘Thy wit is a very bitter-sweeting; it is a most sharp sauce.’ A bittersweet is a cider apple no less. No point in scrumping apples that don’t taste good.

Crab apples are a bit small and dry, high in tannins but very good sliced and fried up with smoked bacon. Even Puck was taken with crabs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ‘And sometime I lurk in a gossip’s bowl in the very likeness of a roasted crab, and when she drinks against her lips I bob.’ There is something tantalising, even romantic, about scrumping apples, either in broad daylight or under a full moon. Applejohns are apples that dry out and though shrivelled keep well to St John’s Day. 

Technically, to scrump is to steal or magic away apples from someone’s orchard. Overhanging branches are useful; boundary fruit. Hedgerow harvest. Foraging, but no legal defence if caught red-handed. In 1846 two Dorset boys were fined 2/- for stealing apples. 3d for the apples plus 3/6d costs, in total 5/9d or three days work. No doubt destined for ‘shoulderin’ cider made from apples in sacks carried off on your shoulder.  

The term scrumpy is often applied to rough farm cider made with apples that may or may not have been nicked, the evidence squashed and then fermented with wild yeasts in old oak barrels. Pressing matters. It can be brilliant or awful, depending on the hygiene of the cidermaker. 

In his poem ‘To Autumn’ John Keats was delighted by the sight of such rural scenes near Winchester. It’s all in the timing.  

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Then there are other fruits worthy of your attention. Pears, some of which, if they are small and hard as grape shot, may well be perry pears. These can be delightful when stewed. Quince vodka is not bad at all. Bramleys can be cored, then carefully inserted with a dried apricot at the bottom as a stopper. Fill the apple with sultanas pre-soaked in brandy, then on top place a lump of honey and roast to perfection.  

Can the England cricket team regain their composure?

Last Thursday’s opening game of the Cricket World Cup saw England roundly thrashed in Ahmedabad, by what looked on paper to be a fairly average New Zealand. 

Posting a stuttering 282 for nine off 50 overs, England threatened to dominate but too often threw wickets away. Jonny Bairstow clipped the second ball of the innings off his legs for six, Root hit a typically fluent and mostly composed 77, and Jos Buttler showed glimpses of the form that made him one of the IPL stars of his generation. 

This apparent batting ease, however was coupled with sloppiness. England still commands immense riches in the batting department, but their bowling looked innocuous and at times poor. The spinners bowled too short. For all their skill and commitment to the England cause over many years, Adil Rashid and Moeen Ali appear just a little past it. Chris Woakes has a nice action and looks good on seaming English pitches. He may yet adapt but arguably doesn’t have the pace or the box of tricks needed to get results in India. Mark Wood bowled fast, as he always does when fit, but wayward. Sam Curran is tidy enough and gets swing early on, but has perhaps lost the mystery factor.

New Zealand’s top order was imperious, in fact, romping home for the loss of just one wicket, and breaking another record along the way. Devon Conway reached 100 runs at a New Zealand ODI best of 83 balls, only to see his batting partner reach three figures soon after, from just 82. Both finished not out, 152 and 123 respectively, an unbroken 273-run partnership.

A curious game of cricket in many ways; the result was almost a foregone conclusion after ten overs of the second innings, the main talking point became the embarrassingly empty stands at the Narendra Modi Stadium. It did fill up a little after working hours with the sun’s heat fading, but there may have been only 4,000 people present to witness Sachin Tendulkar parade the trophy and Jonny Bairstow face the first ball. 

Some English counties might be pleased enough, but this is the World Cup and the Modi stadium is the biggest in the world: an enormous concrete bowl that can host up to 130,000 people. Views of the actual cricket often feel remote, and folks complain about the facilities. The Modi stadium may tell us more about the self-regard of the Prime Minister than India’s undoubted love of cricket.

Behind the scenes, a bigger debate is underway about the viability of the 50-over format. It allows neither the space for twists, turns and sometimes epic human drama that makes test match cricket so compelling, yet rarely does it match the thrills and spills of the high-octane T20 format, which is what really fills both seats and coffers. 

Despite the tiny crowd, the Times of India reported 81 people at the ground requiring an ambulance. One thing they were not suffering from is excessive alcohol consumption. Cricket grounds in India are dry, save for the most exclusive and pricey ‘executive’ boxes, which can set you back over £200. For the rest of us, it’s flat Pepsi all the way. Think of a giant family enclosure at The Hundred and you’re some way there.

The Barmy Army is still gamely selling pricey tour packages for the semi-finals in Mumbai and even the final, back in Ahmedabad on 19 November. If England were to make it, travelling England fans will find not just the stadium but the entire state of Gujarat to be an alcohol-free zone. Consular officers will be pleased but expect travelling support to complain about this, alongside the difficulty in accessing tickets and zealous security guards on entry.

Meanwhile, England regroup. Their next venue is Dharamshala, where they play a spritely Bangladesh today. Bangladesh has good spinners and some powerful middle-order batting.

It may be ‘too early to panic’ but the scale of the defeat to New Zealand leaves England’s run rate in very bad shape. After the first phase ‘round Robin’, only four teams progress. New Zealand looks to have been under-valued, and South Africa has most definitely turned up with their 428 runs off 50 overs against Sri Lanka. The powerhouses of India, Australia, and Pakistan are soon to come. There are no reserve days for the group stage and a rained off game, with points shared, could also disrupt England’s advance. 

At 1,457m above sea level, Dharamshala is the highest international test cricket ground in the world. Bangladesh have been acclimatising for more than a week and already comfortably beat Afghanistan at the same venue. Mountain air is of course good for restoring vitality. But visitors to the foothills of the mighty Himalayas have also been known to take time to overcome the altitude-induced lethargy that sets in. No such luxury for Jos Buttler, Ben Stokes and his men. England need to wake up fast. A second loss today and their World Cup is all but over.

A storm is brewing in the Senate, too

After the US House stole the spotlight last week, sources on the Hill say a similar, yet more “behind-closed-doors” brouhaha is brewing within the Senate.

In the face of a government shutdown, conservatives have been in “constant” cross-chamber communication. For instance, when the Schumer-McConnell bill, with its $6 billion of funding for Ukraine, was on the table the weekend before last, Senate Republicans were apprised that House Democrats were filibustering to get it passed.

As the House convened on Saturday September 30, and the Senate convened at noon for a 1 p.m. vote on the continuing resolution, Senate conservatives — led by Mike Lee, Rick Scott and Ron Johnson — urged their colleagues to withhold their votes to force the Democrats to pass the “clean” (free from Ukraine funding) CR. Had the House and Senate not been so “plugged-in” via meetings, texts, calls, dinners, etc., the Senate conservatives would not have been prepared to stand as firmly as they did.

A source within the Senate tells me overriding McConnell’s dictates “never happens” and is a sign of “a huge vibe shift” and an imminent Senate showdown.

Now that the conservative conference has realized something of a “jailbreak” from the old guard and proven their skill at accomplishing a reversal of the leadership’s dictates, they don’t want to relinquish their position. The CR win was a “training exercise;” next up is an anticipated battle over border policy. There is, my source says, a “huge spectrum of opinion” on funding Ukraine: some lawmakers are willing to trade it for border security; for others, nothing is worth the cost.

I asked Senator Lee what he and his conservative colleagues plan to do with the momentum they’ve garnered following the CR win. He said, “We have a lot to do before the end of the year, and limited time. Traditionally, the playbook has been to jam everyone up against the December holiday and demand passage of a bill no one has read or has had time to amend. We want to make sure the Republican conference does everything we can to avoid that scenario.”

As McConnell’s health decline becomes more apparent, the CR’s expiration (November 17) draws nearer, and conservatives in the House and Senate collaborate more effectively, expect the coming months to involve a lot more “unprecedented” events.

Netanyahu: ‘What we will do to our enemies will echo for generations’

Just a week ago, Benjamin Netanyahu was urging Israelis to take a break. He said citizens should ‘go for a walk in our beautiful country’ during the Sukkot holiday. He posed for photographs with his wife Sara in the Golan Heights, the two of them smiling as the sun set.

Tonight, he prepared citizens for an immense retaliation campaign against Israel’s foes.

He said that the air strikes seen so far against Gaza are ‘just the beginning’, and that ‘what we will do to our enemies in the next few days will echo for generations.’

Earlier today, his defence minister ordered a ‘complete siege’ of the Gaza strip, cutting two million people off from the supply of electricity, food, water and fuel. Israel has mobilised 300,000 military reservists, roughly the same number that Russia did when it invaded Ukraine (Israel’s population is 9 million; Russia’s is 143 million).

The opening of a second front between Israel and Hezbollah looks probable. There were skirmishes earlier today: rockets were fired into Israel from Lebanon, with the IDF responding with artillery strikes. Three Palestinian Jihad members were killed near the Israeli-Lebanon border, after gunmen infiltrated Israeli territory.

The IDF is set to instruct citizens to prepare for a three-day stay in bomb shelters and secure rooms. There are reports that Hezbollah has ordered a full-mobilisation of its forces in Lebanon: the group is thought to have around 25,000 fighters and up to 30,000 more reservists. Hezbollah is weaker militarily than the IDF, but has more rockets than most countries. Their arsenal is thought to contain up to 150,000 rockets, but that figure may have been bolstered by Iranian help.

Netanyahu tonight addressed his speech to Hamas primarily, and compared them to the Islamic State: ‘We have always known what Hamas is. Now the whole world knows. Hamas is Isis. And we will defeat [them] precisely as the enlightened world defeated Isis. Former PM Naftali Bennett said that the current conflict was the Yom Kippur war ‘multiplied by 100’, and that Israel is facing a ‘Nazi conception’ of ‘Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah [and] Iran.’

Hamas has pledged to publish a video of a hostage execution for every unannounced Israeli missile. Up to 130 Israelis are thought to be captive in Gaza.

Israel is yet to fully engage its ground forces, and Hezbollah is yet to fully mobilise. Around 900 Israelis have been killed, and Palestinian deaths have risen to almost 700. Netanyahu is promising revenge. Those figures will rise.

Pro-Hamas protests sweep the US

As the bodies of hundreds of Israelis lay freshly butchered by Hamas terrorists, the group’s supporters from around the world celebrated — including by mourning the dead terrorists and cohosting a rally with a designated terrorist group — and urged them to “globalize the intifada.”

The rallies sprouted up almost immediately after Hamas stunned Israel by launching a surprise attack, likely with Iranian assistance, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. The images of Israeli grandparents and infants being held hostage, and of Israeli villages being wiped out shocked the world. It wasn’t just Israelis who were murdered, however; nine Americans have already been confirmed among the dead, along with German, French and Cambodian citizens. Eyewitness accounts describe women who were raped by Hamas terrorists, taken to Gaza, “paraded through the city’s streets, blood gushing from between their legs.”

Not everyone mourned, however. In fact, at countless protests across America, many were jubilant. I witnessed the White House rally, put on by the ANSWER Coalition, the Party for Socialism and Liberation and others — where chants glorifying the Palestinian terrorists who took Israel by storm were the norm. The crowd itself was far smaller, and less violent, than at a comparable ANSWER Coalition rally with thousands of attendees that I covered almost a decade ago, where participants punched me as I filmed them. 

“They’ve got tanks, we’ve got hang gliders, glory to all the resistance fighters,” they chanted, praising the amphibious attackers on Israeli soil — the first time Israel has been invaded since its near destruction in the surprise 1973 Yom Kippur War. At one point during the rally, a leader urged supporters to do a call-and-response chant in Arabic, only for it to fall flat when they realized that most of the onlookers, who numbered a few hundred at most, hardly spoke the language.

The DC rally was only one of the over-forty pro-Hamas rallies that sprung up following the invasion, from Anchorage to Albuquerque to Austin to Atlanta. In front of the White House, demonstrators defended Palestinian violence against Israel as the “only option” and stated, without regard for proper grammar, that “liberation is a verb.”

As if to tell the weekend’s ralliers to hold their keffiyehs, today’s New York City rally to “to defend the heroic Palestinian resistance” featured a project of a group that has been debanked from credit card processors and labeled a terrorist organization by Israel. The Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network joined with other groups to rally outside the Israeli consulate in New York City. Samidoun is a project of the Alliance for Global Justice, which has been removed from payment platforms such as Stripe over its ties to Palestinian terror. In Los Angeles, the self-loathing Jews of IfNotNow announced they will say the Jewish mourner’s prayer for all who have died in recent days, including the Hamas terrorists that it has mourned in the past. 

Other sponsors of pro-Palestinian rallies across America include the Democratic Socialists of America, whose members include six Democrats in Congress. Among them is Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, whose much-delayed and little-anticipated response to the attacks on Israel was that Israel was asking for it. “As long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government, this heartbreaking cycle of violence will continue,” she said. Earlier this year, the congresswoman was stymied by then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy in her attempts to host an event mourning the creation of Israel.

In contrast with the heavily organized pro-Palestinian demonstrations, the pro-Israel movement across America is far more disjointed. Spontaneous rallies have popped up in synagogues and in national parks, but their numbers are dwarfed by the hustle and numbers on the other side. Further organized gatherings of pro-Israel Americans are planned for the coming days, but they were hampered by the Jewish holidays that coincided with the attacks — which many cite as the impetus for the strikes happening when they did.

At the pro-Israel rally I attended outside the Israeli Embassy, several dozen attendees struck a markedly different tone than at the rally resplendent with Palestinian and Soviet Union flags outside the White House: it was solemn and mournful. One speaker almost broke down describing how he knows people who’ve been butchered and others who’ve been kidnapped. 

The signs there conveyed messages like “we stand with Israel,” a sharp divergence from the genocidal “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” chants from earlier in the day.

British anti-Semites are delighted by the attack on Israel

You might think the massacre of Jewish civilians will stop anti-Jewish hatred in Britain. Or, if that is too much to ask, you might think that the atrocities would at least merit a decent period of silence before normal service resumed. 

Not a bit of it. This morning, Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust (CST), which monitors anti-Jewish hate crimes, was reading reports that the windows of Pita, a kosher restaurant in Golders Green, had been smashed. His first thought was that it could be a racially-motivated attack: a Jewish restaurant in a north London suburb famed for its large Jewish population. What were the odds? Slogans calling for a ‘Free Palestine’ had also appeared on a bridge on Golders Green Road.

‘Anti-Semites are getting excited by the sight of dead Jews,’ Rich told me. ‘Sorry to be blunt but I am in an uncompromising mood. They’re not angry because Israeli soldiers have killed Palestinians. The sight of Hamas murdering Israeli civilians has exhilarated them instead and filled them with joy. We’ve had reports of people driving past synagogues shouting “kill the Jews” and “fuck you”.’

The violence will get worse. The Israeli government will respond to the murders by broadening its attacks on Gaza. Whether Israel is willing to take the casualties an occupation of the strip will bring is far from clear, but it has said Hamas had declared war and will fight back accordingly. 

The Israeli counter-attack will provide a new justification for anti-Semitic violence in the UK. Everyone who monitors anti-Jewish racism knows it. The conflict between Israel and Hamas from 8 May to 7 June 2021 produced what the CST called ‘the most intense period of anti-Jewish hatred seen in the UK in recent years.’ We can expect more of the same.

The violence raises questions too few people are willing to ask. When Russia commits crimes against humanity in Ukraine, no one targets Russians living in London. When Islamists murder Christians in Africa, no one calls for the death of British Muslims.

Yet, as we have learned over the weekend, if anything happens in Israel, Jews are targeted in the UK. If Hamas massacres Israeli civilians, Jews pay. If the Israeli Defence Forces attack Hamas, Jews pay.

In our supposedly progressive times, when anti-racism is a moral mission, few concentrate on a shameful statistic. There are only 271,000 Jews in the UK according to the last census. Yet the Home Office says that this tiny group contains the victims of a quarter of all religious hate crimes.

There is one final inconvenient fact: Hamas is a far-right wing clerical fascist movement. It supports everything progressive people say they are against: genocide, misogyny, homophobia, and dictatorship. Sections of the Hamas charter of 1988, which contrary to the claims of Western apologists, the organisation has never renounced, are so filled with anti-Semitic conspiracism, they read as if Hitler wrote them. 

Yet it has proved impossible for a significant minority of left-wing and liberal-minded westerners to walk and chew gum at the same time. Why do they condemn the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and deplore the crimes of its security forces, while ignoring the actions of Islamist extremists, who, in other circumstances, they would loathe? Why are Harvard students holding Israel ‘entirely responsible’ for the murder of Israelis, and pro-Palestinian protestors taking to the streets before the blood of the Jewish dead has even dried? 

This isn’t simply a niche concern. The failure to confront anti-Semitism has been a disaster for the British left. All the Palestinian Solidarity Committee, Socialist Workers party, the Stop the War coalition or the campaign group of left-wing Labour MPs needed to do was build a barrier that excluded anti-Jewish racists from the left. They never did it. They never said that racist views were simply unacceptable in left-wing movements. 

The failure to tackle anti-Semitism helped destroy the left’s one chance of gaining power. Polling on why Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour party to its worst defeat since 1935 in the 2019 general election found that working-class voters saw him as ‘weak, indecisive, and lacking in patriotism’. He had ‘failed to deal with anti-Semitism’ in the Labour party. They would rather vote Conservative than put up with that. 

The kind explanation for the failure to confront racism and fascism on the left is that the tidy liberal mind hates not having neat answers. If progressives accepted that Hamas was an Islamist movement from the ultra-religious right, they would have to accept that a just settlement to the Palestinian question was impossible. 

Of course, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli right make peace impossible too. But liberals know how to oppose them and can imagine a day when they are gone. Radical Islam is different. It is not a part of progressives’ mental universe. It’s not just that they don’t know how to oppose it, they don’t understand what it is. 

Racist stereotypes play their part. Centuries of anti-Semitic hatred cast Jews as rich. The new ‘woke’ identitarian ideology casts them as ‘white’. Rich, white people cannot be the victims of racism, as every right-thinking progressive knows.

The harsh answer is that, though it is in their self-interest, many on the Western left cannot oppose anti-Semitism and radical Islam because the first two decades of the 21st century saw the Hamasification of progressive movements. As the old Marxist revolutionary faith died, Islamist politics provided the far left with a new source of anti-Western zeal. So we had Jeremy Corbyn’s Stop the War coalition and Ken Livingstone allying with clerical forces previous generations of leftists would have regarded, quite rightly, as reactionary. 

Inevitably, anti-Semitism is a part of some of the left’s Hamasification, and inevitably left-wing movements could not make an anti-racist stand without repudiating their new Islamist allies. It has taken the Labour party an almighty effort to rid itself of the stain, but racism is still there in the wider left. It is no use pretending that leftists don’t know about the dangers this poses. They know but don’t care. 

After monitoring anti-Semitic violence for years, Dave Rich has concluded that the people who are still prepared to go out and blame the murders of Jews on Israel are ‘just obsessive cranks who hate Jews’. It’s that simple. 

As I listen to Jewish people warning their children to watch out for themselves it is hard to disagree. Anti-Semitic violence will return to the UK because polite progressive society lacks the will to stop it or the honesty to admit that it exists.

Rachel Reeves is no longer ‘boring’

Rachel Reeves was once branded ‘boring snoring’ by a BBC editor. Today, she was more of a Scary Mary in her speech to conference, repeatedly casting herself as an Iron Lady whose iron discipline would make it difficult for any of her colleagues to get any money for their pet spending projects. In the decade since she was dissed as being dull, Reeves has grown in confidence and stature, and the speech she gave today was really very good: energetic and forceful to the extent that many of those shadow cabinet colleagues watching on the conference floor looking a little scared of her.

Some of those colleagues have already given their speeches: this morning’s conference session saw shadow foreign secretary David Lammy and shadow defence secretary John Healey speaking, followed by a session themed on work and business that included shadow work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall and shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds. All quite different politicians, but there was one striking similarity about their speeches: not much that was new. Reeves’s speech was policy rich, while the rest of the shadow cabinet have been left to set out what Labour stands for in their brief, rather than any detail of what they’ll be doing specifically. Kendall, for instance, listed the groups who had been ‘written off’ and left ‘on the back foot’ by the Conservatives, before promising that ‘under Labour this will change’. She gave some hints at what that change might look like, including ‘recruiting thousands more mental health staff and overhauling skills’ and ‘transform employment support so it’s tailored to individual and local needs’. She reiterated what the party has already pledged, which is to reform Universal Credit and a new cross-government child poverty strategy. Healey pledged to accelerate the £2 billion pledged by the government for new stockpiles, while Lammy announced a new whistleblower scheme for those who exposed kleptocracy in the form of stolen assets.

All of them have had a clear script given to them by Starmer’s office. All the speeches contained repeated uses of ‘together we will’, and they ended similarly with the slogan about giving Britain its future back. ‘Together, we will build a brighter Britain. And give our country its future back.’ Or ‘Together – we can win, together – we will give Britain its future back’. and ‘With Labour, this is the Britain we will build.’

Keir Starmer’s aim with this conference is to answer the question of ‘if not the Tories, why Labour?’ But there is currently a bit of a gap between the ‘we will build a brighter Britain’ and the iron discipline of Rachel Reeves’ speech, which had less of a vision of how Britain might tangibly change. And with her shadow cabinet colleagues also constrained in how much spending they might be able to allocate to their areas, the answer to ‘why us’ isn’t ‘things are going to change dramatically’. 

Mark Carney is wrong to endorse Rachel Reeves

The timing could hardly have been better. Other Labour leaders and shadow chancellors have had to make do with endorsements from the drummer in a 90s Britpop band, or a runner up for the Booker Prize. Rachel Reeves, however, rounded off her speech to the Labour party conference today with no one other than the former Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney singing her praises.

But hold on. Isn’t Carney starting to abuse his position – and possibly the Bank’s independence as well? 

At least we know who Carney would be voting for if he happened to still be in the country. ‘Rachel Reeves is a serious economist,’ he told delegates at the conference in a video message. ‘She understands the economics of work, of place and family. And, look, it is beyond time we put her energy and ideas into action.’

Well, perhaps. But in fact there are a whole series of problems with Carney’s intervention. Whether a multi-millionaire former Goldman Sachs banker genuinely knows anything about the working people that Labour is meant to represent is one of them. Another is that, if he has found anything even remotely resembling an ‘idea’ in anything the studiously bland Reeves has ever said, it would be a miracle.

But the main problem is this. The Bank of England is not meant to be a partisan institution, and Carney owes his entire reputation to the Bank. If it were not for his eight years in the job no one would be in the least interested in anything he had to say.

Other former governors have kept their views largely to themselves. By taking sides so openly Carney is turning the Bank into a political body, and one that sides with Labour. If that continues it is hard to see how its independence can survive. 

In fact, for an intelligent man Carney has remarkably poor judgment. We saw that in his erratic management of the Bank of England, leaving a legacy of inflation, indebtedness and muddled, failing regulation. And we can see it even more in his meddling in British politics.

He is abusing his position, and embarrassing himself. The sooner the Bank publicly disassociates itself from him the better. 

Labour’s grand plan? More borrowing

Rachel Reeves’s speech at Labour party conference was an attempt to show how the party’s economic strategy differs from the Tories. Oddly, the shadow chancellor decided to do this by cherry-picking the showstoppers from both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak’s highlight reels. 

Reeves’s accusations were numerous, though predominantly levelled at Truss and her disastrous 49-day premiership. ‘When you pay fast and loose with the public finances’, she said, ‘it’s working families that pay that price’ – a sentiment that no doubt resonates with the many households that were acutely affected by the surge in mortgage costs last autumn. The shadow chancellor repeated one of Labour’s favourite, if not misleading, claims that Truss and her chancellor ‘crashed the economy’. This is a fairly easy one for the government to refute: expectations for borrowing costs surged and the pound tumbled, but no recession was triggered by the mini-Budget. Some of her other points, however, will be much harder to rebut. ‘Growth weak, wages flat, taxes up, the price of energy up, the price of the family food shop up.’ Apart from a recent uptick in wages, her list hit on every economic vulnerability the Tory party faces.

Yet it was almost within the same breath that Reeves was lambasting the former prime minister – ‘Liz Truss may be out of Downing Street, but she is still running the Conservative party’ – whilst also adopting her core strategy of pivoting towards economic growth. ‘In contrast, Labour’s defining economic mission is to restore growth to Britain’, proclaimed Reeves – not too far off the previous government that gambled the whole house on a ‘Growth Plan’. 

How does Labour plan to rev up the economy? Again, the answer sounds uncomfortably familiar: with government borrowing. ‘You cannot tax and spend your way to economic growth’ – a statement that is no doubt true, also a near copy-paste of Truss’s comments to Keir Starmer in September last year. Labour’s answer is to get business more interested in Britain, by increasing the amount of capital investment flowing into the country, to the tune of an additional £50 billion every year. But its plan to attract that investment is to ‘de-risk’ investment by making the taxpayer liable, too – pledging that every pound put into the party’s proposed ‘national wealth fund’ will go alongside three pounds of private investment.

To Labour’s credit, their plan to borrow for investment (primarily in energy infrastructure, but for other building projects too) is different from Truss’s agenda last year, in that Reeves insists no money will be borrowed for day-to-day spending, and debt as a percentage of GDP must still be forecast to decline over the course of the parliament. But as Truss learned the hard way last year, borrowing large sums of cash to indicate to business a brighter future is ahead doesn’t have the same lure it used to – and Reeves did little to provide reasons as to why her strategy would go down better with the markets than Truss’s did.

Her answer, perhaps, might be in the signalling. Unlike the former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng – who only started talking about spending restraint when the mini-Budget was being torn apart – Reeves is using the language of fiscal responsibility from the outset, insisting that Labour will approach the public finances with ‘iron discipline’. Here, she is tapping into Sunak’s greatest hits. Reeves insisted that Sunak ‘hand the chance to denounce the politics and the policies of Liz Truss’ at his own party conference and failed to do so – a claim that is unlikely to pack the punch she’d like, not least because Sunak ended up in No.10 because he was a minority voice last summer warning about the consequences of fiscal loosening.

Reeves has also picked up the language of tax cuts from Sunak, insisting she ‘wants them to be lower’ but can’t help but propose more. While Starmer and Reeves have clearly laid out what taxes they won’t hike if in power – including income tax, and a wealth tax has been ruled out too – Reeves rattled off plenty of ideas for tax grabs this afternoon, including the resurgence of some kind of digital sales tax, with focus on the ‘online giants’ who they want to see ‘pay their fair share’ (this could be expressed, instead, as a tax on the Amazon customers who need baby bottles or medical supplies shipped express to their front door. Reeves also called for a ‘proper windfall tax,’ suggesting again that the effective 75 per cent tax rate on the big energy companies right now is not high enough (Labour has not yet stated just how high they’d take this figure).

And Reeves confirmed an additional tax today on overseas buyers looking to purchase a home in the UK, implemented through a stamp duty increase. It’s an odd move for a shadow chancellor who likes to emphasise the housing crisis and who pledged today that Labour is the party with the vision to rebuild Britain’ – not least because stamp duty is one of the most distortive taxes, further clogging up the housing market.

But Reeves was not just recycling some of her opponent’s language and ideas today; she also dug up some of the ideas her party has been pushing for a decade, including plans to ban zero-hours contracts and further divert decisions about the minimum wage away from the Low Pay Commission and towards politicians instead.

Reeves is likely to get away with cherry-picking from the Truss and Sunak playbook – not least because, despite all the promises made to grow the economy, no one (so far) has managed to do it. This gives Labour the opportunity to present the idea of growth as a new, and crucially, somewhat different offer from the Tories. But for a speech that was supposed to show off Labour’s fiscal credentials, there was an awful lot of borrowing and taxing in there – the consequences of which voters will be mulling.

Mark Carney’s endorsement of Rachel Reeves will hurt the Tories

Listening to Rachel Reeves’s speech at Labour party conference one could be forgiven for thinking Liz Truss is still in 10 Downing Street. The shadow chancellor referenced the former prime minister more times than Rishi Sunak as she used her moment on the conference stage in Liverpool to try to depict Labour as the less risky choice on the economy.

Reeves claimed that ‘Liz Truss might be out of Downing Street but she is still leading the Conservative party’. The shadow chancellor said that only a Labour government could safeguard against Truss’s Tories – and she was cheered when she mentioned her plan to introduce legislation to ensure the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) can independently publish its own impact assessment of any major fiscal event, in a reference to Truss’s mini budget. Expect more of these type of attacks in the coming months; Labour plans to ramp up the idea that, were the Tories to win a fifth term, the party would be a danger, as a reduced majority would see MPs on the right of the party wield greater influence.

As for what a Labour government would do, Reeves once again said that fiscal discipline would be front and centre in a Labour government, vowing to stick to ‘iron-clad fiscal rules’ if in power. She also promised to raise stamp duty on property bought by overseas buyers – with the money going on housebuilding. When it comes to Labour’s ambitious claims on growth, it’s clear that Reeves sees planning reform as key. She suggested a planning rules shake up would not only mean more housing but also speed up green energy and 5G projects (though questions remain on how long this could take to have a significant impact). This was one of the fleeting mentions of her green energy plan, with Reeves choosing to talk more about other Labour pledges.

Introducing Reeves to the stage was Mary Portas, the retail expert. The former adviser to David Cameron said Reeves was the politician who understood how to save the high street and her ideas were needed in No. 11. Given Portas has been very critical of the Tories in recent years her endorsement isn’t that surprising – but it fits with Reeves’s efforts in recent months to get big business and former Tory donors on side.

But the endorsement that Reeves will really be celebrating came after the speech in a video clip. Mark Carney, the former Bank of England governor, declared his backing for Reeves to be Britain’s next chancellor, describing her as a ‘serious economist’ and referencing her time working at the Bank of England. Now the riposte to this is that Carney has long been out of favour with parts of the Tory party – many Brexiteers associate him with Project Fear over Brexit. He also recently spoke in Montreal at a summit for centre left progressives. But given George Osborne as chancellor appointed Carney – chasing him across the world to do so and describing him as ‘the outstanding central banker of his generation’ – it’s this endorsement that, for at least some Tories, will hurt the most.

How Big Brother lost touch with reality

Big Brother is back – again. The show was axed by Channel 5 in 2018 but ITV has dragged it out of the grave. Watching the show’s opening episode last night made me wonder whether we’re trapped forever in a time loop with the big TV shows of the early noughties – Strictly, I’m A Celebrity, The Weakest Link – doomed to keep coming back. But where once they were exciting and fun, now they look exhausted.

Big Brother 2023 comes with all the trappings of our age. Everybody on the first show last night talked in the customary over-excited mid-Atlantic screech of the 21st century. This won’t last, because it never does; one of the great sources of fun is watching these affectations drain away, leaving the contestants effing and blinding at each other like Wolverhampton fishwives.

Several of the contestants claim to be entering the house to ‘show’ something about their identity group. ‘A lot of people think that wearing a headscarf might stop you from having opportunities,’ says Farida. I must confess that this thought hadn’t occurred to me, nor I suspect to anybody else.

Trish, from Luton, tells us she’s there to ‘humanise refugees and immigrants, especially in this political climate…We are important simply because we exist, not only when we participate in capitalism.’ That’s nice, dear, but I wasn’t expecting to have my political consciousness upended while munching crisps, slumped in front of ITV2.

Like everything else on TV, Big Brother is cast to reflect a Camden Council pamphlet and not the world as it actually is. There are numerous people claiming to be ‘queer’, whatever that means, a high mix of minorities and a man who thinks he is a woman. But if the show looks ‘representative’ their talking points are hardly an accurate depiction of modern Britain.

The reality is that Big Brother will never again repeat the highs of its second outing in 2001. The secret of that series was that no one on it cared much about politics. Contestants like Helen Adams, a 22-year-old hairdresser from Newport in Wales, and Paul Clarke, a 25-year-old car designer from Reading, cared more about trying to hook up. Their romance was a gem to behold, with Adams dropping unintentional solecisms such as ‘I like blinking, me’, and Clarke declaring that he had ‘always lived the life of an international pop star’. (In a Reading car showroom.) The series’ winner was the infectiously chirpy young gay man Brian Dowling, 21. Because this was a decade before the Great Madness of identity and grievance, his win was regarded casually as a nice thing to see, and then everybody got back on with whatever they’d been doing.

Clarke, Adams, Dowling and the rest were held up by some po-faced critics as the faces of a future where the young didn’t much care about the world they lived in. What bliss! At the time I was reading historian Michael Burleigh’s book The Third Reich: A New History. It was a good advert for why we shouldn’t be unduly bothered if young people aren’t political. The sight of Helen, Paul and Brian et al talking rubbish seemed wonderful to me. It was a sure sign of societal success that these daft young people had the freedom and the space to live peaceful, daft, young lives. No, they weren’t interested in William Hague and Tony Blair. But neither were they ranting about the master race and Jewish conspiracies, like the youngsters in the book. That seemed a pretty good thing to me.

Twenty years and a bit on, and some political apathy among the young would be welcome. From race to the environment to gender we hear a lot of (identical) youth opinion. Everything formerly divertingly light and fluffy must now be laden with portentous political significance. The world has become like one of those cover versions of ‘Proud Mary’ where the singer seems convinced it contains the meaning of life, although it’s about a bloody ferry.

Big Brother has only been gone five years, though nobody but me and the contestants’ relatives were still tuning in by 2018. Most people will remember only the first few series, not the increasingly less interesting one that this new version is more reminiscent of – where the contestants are a cross section, not of the public per se, but only of the people mad enough to go on Big Brother. ITV have promised to make ‘reality TV real again’ and ‘raw’, but that certainly isn’t apparent yet; significantly, the opening night was a pre-record, which takes much of the frisson away. There is a heavy aura of what we might call ‘the Ofcom sweats’ about the thing, a squeamish nervousness that cuts across the unbridled spirit of it.

Television nowadays reflects such an inaccurate image of Britain. There are still many more Helens and Pauls – the extraordinary ordinary Brits – out there. We just hardly ever hear from them. We probably never will again. (Tellingly, the only entrant of Big Brother 2001 who still lingers on our screens has reinvented herself as a very angry faux-leftist rent-a-gob on GB News.)

Unsurprisingly there were no Helens and Pauls on last night’s show. Big Brother 2023 shows that ‘representation’ isn’t actually representative – in fact, in a grand example of television eating its cake and having it, it often means something uncomfortably close to a circus freak show. Reality? Not really.

Douglas Ross: ‘The Scottish Tories could have a really good general election’

The SNP wasn’t the only loser last week when Labour triumphed in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election with a 20 per cent swing – the Scottish Conservatives also had reason to feel short-changed. Their vote collapse was so dire that Tory candidate Thomas Kerr only won 3.9 per cent and lost his £500 deposit. While the party insists that the Rutherglen result is not representative of Scotland more generally, it shows the tricky terrain the Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross faces.

‘You’re going to see Conservative gains at the next general election,’ he insists, when we met in Manchester at the Conservative Party Conference. Sheltering from the rain in a fringe event tent, Ross explains why an SNP implosion could work in his party’s favour. ‘The most recent poll showed us picking up a couple of seats in Scotland and I think that’s not what people are expecting at the moment,’ he says. ‘I think we could have a really good general election.’

Is his confidence misplaced? Polling this year has placed Ross as the least popular Scottish party leader and the Scottish Tories are still in third place, behind Labour and the SNP. Labour’s victory last week in the Rutherglen and Hamilton by-election is adding to the sense that Anas Sarwar’s party could clean up at the next election and become the largest party north of the border. But Ross thinks it is too early to write the Scottish nationalists off. ‘The SNP are down but they’re not out,’ he warns, pointing to the importance of the constitutional question in Scottish politics. Voters, he says, don’t think the Scottish government is performing well but ‘they still want independence and they will continue to support the SNP as a result of that’. Campaigning for independence is, Ross believes, ‘totally the wrong priority at the worst possible time’. 

The Tory leader is also an assistant referee in top-flight Scottish football who has learned how to deal with criticism after facing off frustrated Celtic fans on a number of occasions. A dairy farmer by trade, the cheesy taste doesn’t stop there: Ross is an unlikely Atomic Kitten superfan, describing their withdrawal from his local ‘MacMoray’ music festival in Elgin as ‘the most disappointing announcement that I’ve heard’. And, as well as being the MSP for the Highlands and Islands, he also holds a Westminster seat for Moray – coming under criticism after an investigation revealed Ross worked the most ‘second job’ hours of any MP. He will not be standing at the next general election and First Minister Humza Yousaf is already eyeing up his seat. Ross won it from the SNP’s Westminster group leader Angus Robertson in 2017 – but achieving a majority of only 513 at the last election, it’s up for grabs. Far from being worried however, Ross appeared upbeat about his party’s chances in the wake of the SNP’s implosion.

So what should the Scottish Conservative vision be? So far, Ross has earned a reputation for regularly putting out a different message to that coming from Conservative Campaign Headquarters in Westminster. To some it’s strategic bravery but to critics it’s evidence of his tendency to ‘flip flop’ over decisions. Ross resigned from government after Boris Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings was found to have journeyed from London to Durham during the initial lockdown. He then condemned Johnson after revelations about Partygate made it into the papers, saying the former prime minister’s position was ‘untenable’ and calling for his resignation. But only a month later, Ross changed his mind, withdrawing his letter demanding a confidence vote. The Scottish Tory leader was slammed for backing Truss’s mini-Budget, before admitting that the ‘optics’ of the chaos surrounding Liz Truss’ government were ‘awful’. Earlier this year, Ross was criticised for not whipping his MPs to support the findings of the Privileges Committee into partygate. Does he regret any of these decisions? ‘No,’ Ross answers instantly, describing how his stance on Johnson changed due to the Ukraine war. Does he still have serious concerns about Boris Johnson? ‘Oh, absolutely,’ he replied, without skipping a beat. 

Is he worried about Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, too? The Tory conference took place only months after Sunak made headlines in the Scottish press for failing to name even four members of the Holyrood Tory shadow cabinet. Ross brushes it off: ‘I could be asked to name five junior ministers who are colleagues of mine – and I probably couldn’t name five.’ And what about relations with No. 10? Does the Scottish Tory leader find that they can be fraught given Ross is often inclined to go his own way with his party, who are less on the political right than their UK party colleagues? ‘We’ve always been a unique political party,’ says Ross, pointing to variation between the Scottish and UK Tory manifestos. ‘At times we do things differently in Scotland because of our geography, because of our demographics. And it’s right that we have the autonomy to do that.’ 

But Ross rules out the idea of breaking away entirely from the UK Conservatives. ‘That has been put to our members,’ he says of Tory MSP Murdo Fraser’s failed leadership bid in 2011, who proposed to disband the Scottish Tories and establish a new centre-right party. Fraser did have the support of a large proportion of the MSP group at the time but came a close second to Ruth Davidson, who won by just over 500 votes. Ross uses Fraser’s failed bid to evidence how splitting the parties would be unpopular — despite the vote being held over a decade ago. ‘That’s still the feeling of the vast majority of people in the Scottish Conservatives.’ Even after the last year of sleaze allegations and the Partygate scandal? ‘Yes.’ 

It remains to be seen what Ross plans to do to improve his party’s fortunes. There are grumbles of discontent coming from his own MSPs about the current state of the party, and Ross’s recent reshuffle hasn’t helped matters. Jamie Greene MSP was demoted before the summer recess and had suggested that his sacking was linked to his voting in favour of the SNP’s controversial gender bill. A party source described it as a ‘rudimentary’ ploy to get rid of a leadership rival. Defending his decision, Ross says: ‘We can’t just keep with the same people in the same positions for the entire parliamentary term’. Would he apply the same approach to the leadership – and let a colleague have a turn? ‘No, I’m very happy leading the Scottish Conservatives,’ he replied.

But Ross’s MSPs are beginning to get restless. While more contained than the UK party’s infighting, figures within the party have warned it is facing ‘death by a thousand cuts’ under his leadership. Maurice Golden MSP criticised his party’s ‘slump in the polls’ as being ‘clearly unacceptable’ and has more recently spoken out against Sunak’s ‘deeply disappointing’ net zero u-turns before voting against his party on their adjusted climate change stance. Ross has not spoken to Golden since he made his comments and pointed to technicalities that would prevent him disciplining his MSP: ‘You can discipline someone if they hold a position because you can take them out of that role that they have. Maurice doesn’t hold a position within the group at Holyrood. He’s a busy MSP in the north east of Scotland, but he doesn’t actually have a position that he can be removed from.’

The year ahead will be a tough one for the Scottish Tories, despite Ross’s unwaveringly positive outlook. For Ross to make the Tory gains he’s promising at the next election, he’s facing a fight on two fronts: to convince the conservative parts of the SNP movement that the Tories are best placed to protect social values and rural jobs – while battling against Labour to defend the Conservatives’ position as the party of the Union in Scotland. The 2024 general election is only the first hurdle before the Scottish parliament elections take place two years later. With all that he has to contend with, it would be easy to forgive Ross for wanting to pack it all in and return to dairy farming in Moray. So does he see himself remaining at the top, leading the Scottish Tories into the 2026 Holyrood election? He doesn’t hesitate: ‘Yes. Absolutely.’

Israelis are furious at Benjamin Netanyahu

Israelis are livid. Their fury is directed not only at Hamas for massacring over 700 people, wounding thousands and abducting at least 130 including women and children, but also at the Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) for failing to prevent this terrorist invasion.

How did Israeli security forces – among the most sophisticated in the world – not foresee Hamas’s attack? A postmortem is already underway, but what is clear is that Netanyahu’s government was caught napping, distracted by its attempts to force through unpopular judicial reforms. This stole attention away from the worsening security situation in Gaza, the West Bank and the border with Lebanon. Now, Israelis have paid a heavy price.

Netanyahu has, in his many years as prime minster, opted for a policy of containment of Hamas. But while his robust rhetoric has fostered his image as a ‘security first’ leader, his actions have actually strengthened Hamas’s position and undermined the more moderate Palestinian Authority. This outcome was no accident: it was a policy meant to sabotage chances of a peace settlement with the Palestinians, which would have been wildly unpopular with Bibi’s supporters. It will become clearer later whether Israeli intelligence missed vital information, or knew and its warnings were ignored by the government.

Another failure during the early hours of Saturday morning’s attack was the army’s inability to recognise the breach in the security fence between Gaza and Israel, contain the influx of terrorists into Israel and respond swiftly to protect towns near the border. It took forces many hours to arrive at centres of attacks and free civilians. Their ability to counter the attack was hampered by Hamas’s assault on the military base that houses the Gaza Division of the IDF. Other bases in the region were understaffed and unprepared. Urban warfare, especially where civilians are held hostage, is extremely complicated and slow, and the Israelis were on the back foot from the outset.

In the chaos that ensued, civilians who have spent many hours hiding under fire and having to defend themselves, have criticised the army for being absent when it was needed the most. The question on everyone’s lips during the first day of the war was: ‘Where is the army?’

Haaretz journalist Amir Tibon, who lives in kibbutz Nahal Oz, close to the border with the Gaza strip, was in hiding with his wife and two young daughters for ten hours. In an indication of the army’s lack of readiness, he was eventually rescued by his father, a retired General, who came to the southern town from his home in the centre of Israel.

Bereaved families and relatives of those who are missing and abducted have accused the government of failing to properly communicate with them. At a news conference on Sunday, dozens of angry Israelis, desperate for information on loved ones, demanded information. Into the void left by the government and civil service, ordinary people have stepped up: Israelis have been providing transportation for reservists who had to reach their units and have purchased vital equipment for soldiers, such as ceramic body armour. Civilians also established centres offering emotional support and help for those searching for information, mainly from social media, about the missing. The Israeli community has come together, but the sluggish response from the government will not easily be forgotten.

For now, Netanyahu’s administration is focused on revenge. ‘The enemy will pay an unprecedented price,’ the Israeli leader has vowed. Yet for all this fiery talk, the war’s goals remain unclear. If the IDF is seeking to destroy Hamas, this will be extremely challenging to achieve. Returning hostages is also a delicate business fraught with danger. It will mean deploying ground forces in a prolonged and difficult war. It also means many more Israeli casualties. To achieve this, the government requires the public’s trust, resilience and patience. But that is sorely lacking.

John McDonnell: the fascists are in government

With Labour ahead in the polls by around 15 points, and the party seemingly on course to win a general election next year, you would think it would be all sunshine and smiles at the Labour conference, held in Liverpool.

It appears though that some of the party are less than happy with the current situation they find themselves in. Yesterday, at a packed fringe event at conference, the Labour Assembly Against Austerity and the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs gathered to discuss ‘Socialist Solutions to the Tory Crisis’ – but predominantly seemed occupied with the dreadful thought that the party might actually get elected.

Chief among the naysayers was Zarah Sultana MP, who didn’t exactly dispel her reputation for sounding like a student politician, when she informed the room that she tells people all the time that: ‘politics is a bit s***, innit’, and expressed her displeasure at the idea that ‘corporates’ were sponsoring conference events.

Other featured speakers included Bell Ribeiro-Addy, who led a group ‘solidarity Diane Abbott’ chant, after Abbott lost the whip in April for her musings on anti-Semitism in a letter to the Guardian (Abbott later said she sent the wrong draft of a letter in).

But it was former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell who was the faded star of the evening. McDonnell began by saying it was nice to be amongst Labour party members because:

‘When I came into conference this morning, there were so many corporates I thought it was the CBI conference.’

As the man he tried to make prime minister refused to condemn Hamas outside the conference hall, McDonnell assured the room that it was in fact the Tories who were the true menace to society, saying:

‘What always happens with regimes like this is that they get more reactionary… there’s a debate in the media… arguments in the Financial Times about why isn’t there an extreme right-wing party in this country, a fascist party. Well, it’s not necessary because the fascists are in government’.

But if McDonnell isn’t a fan of the Tories, he’s not much more fond of the current Labour leadership either. The Labour MP said the current administration brought to mind the Napoleonic saying about lucky generals, saying:

‘Starmer is a lucky general. To be honest, we haven’t done an awful lot to gain power, but the Tories have done enough to fall apart… It’s like winning an election by default.’

Mr S wonders if you could possibly say the same about the 2017 election, which saw Theresa May conduct one of the most stunningly awful election campaigns in British politics, only to still beat the Corbynite rabble.

As if to underline the dire fate of the Labour left at the moment, the fringe ended with a speech from that master of wit and erudition, Richard Burgon, who was met with rapturous applause. If Burgon is one of your leading lights, the path ahead must be very dark indeed…

Why are Jews being blamed for Hamas’s attack on Israel?

‘Victim blaming’ is one of the sins that is most deplored by the social justice movement. When it comes to the Jews, however, different rules seem to apply, at least when it comes to rape, murder and mutilation.

The events of the past few days could not have been more clear-cut. This was an unprovoked assault by Islamist fanatics who rampaged across southern Israel, revelling in savagery against the innocent. The atrocities you have seen on television have been the tip of the iceberg. Women have been butchered, their bodies paraded and desecrated, while grandmothers have been kidnapped with their carers and executed. Families have been gunned down in bomb shelters. Babies and children have been dragged away into captivity in Gaza. There has been at least one apparent beheading. Israeli forces were caught napping. Yet the tone of some of the coverage has suggested that the Jews deserved it.

Across the west, meanwhile, the response has been a carnival of Israelophobia. Rallies have mushroomed in several British cities – in solidarity with the murderers, not the victims. Footage believed to be from the Netherlands showed a man climbing a flagpole to tear down an Israeli flag and trample it. Canadian youngsters have been filmed dancing and cheering in delight, as if at a football game. On the streets of Manchester, crowds have been chanting openly in support of Hamas. As I write, if you type #prayfor… into Instagram, it will autosuggest #prayforpalestine, which is about seven times more popular than #prayforIsrael. Pray for the killers, not the dead.

Yesterday, a ‘joint statement’ by the Harvard university Palestine solidarity groups made it clear:

‘We, the undersigned student organisations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence.‘

The truth is that there is no ‘occupation’ in Gaza. Israel withdrew unilaterally from the territory in 2005. Yesterday, an internal email from the Canadian state broadcaster went viral; staff were instructed not to mention this verifiable fact, because ‘Israel has maintained control over airspace, seafront and virtually all movement into or out of the area’. No, Canada: that is not an occupation. Securing the border is necessary for Israel’s safety. If you’re in any doubt, look at the events of the past few days. All too often, the western media is complicit in a narrative that is simply untrue, and functions to undermine the Jewish state’s right to exist in peace.

Not only is there no ‘apartheid’ in Israel, there is no ‘apartheid wall’ either. Before the separation barrier was constructed on the West Bank, suicide bombs in Jerusalem and other Israeli towns were almost a weekly occurrence. Since its completion, they have reduced to nearly zero. Attempts to reinterpret the barrier as a gesture of racial segregation amount to little more than efforts to hijack the language of identity politics to undermine Israel’s defences. What is the country supposed to do? Welcome suicide bombers and murderous hoards from Gaza to avoid being accused of ‘apartheid’ and ‘occupation’ by blue-haired lefties on Twitter and their allies in the United Nations?

Israelophobia is the newest form of the oldest hatred. Whereas Jews were hated as the Christ killers in medieval times and as an inferior race in the 20^th century, these days they are hated for the sake of their national home. This redux version of antisemitism is political, meaning it can be more easily embraced by those eccentric Jews who are desperate to be accepted by the hard-left, where they are used in bad faith as alibis.

In an almost unbelievable showcase of this phenomenon, even while Israelis were being butchered, one Jewish leftist tweeted: ‘Today should be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide… The struggle for freedom is rarely bloodless and we shouldn’t apologise for it.’ A great darkness is lying across the moral conscience of the west and dispelling it has become an almost insurmountable task.

The Jews are an ancient people, and this is nothing new for us. Whether in Palestine, Europe or the Arab lands, pogroms have always been justified in the tropes of the day. In medieval Europe, massacring the Christ killers was seen as the work of God. During the Second World War, it was seen as a means to cleanse the world of subhuman parasites. In postwar Palestine, Jewish communities were massacred by Arab mobs because they had the temerity to wish to live in their ancestral lands. 

I have in my possession the cover of a French magazine from 1929, entitled Le Petit Journal. It shows an illustration of Arabs hacking Jews to death with swords, accompanied by the caption: ‘les troubles en Palestine: Des Arabes massacrent des Juifs dans les divers quartiers de Jérusalem.’ The events it recorded, the Palestine Riots, included a notorious mass killing of almost 70 Jews in Hebron, where the tomb of the Jewish patriarchs is located. That murderous rampage was sparked by the conspiracy theory that the Jews were planning to seize Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This was 18 years before the state of Israel was established, let alone any ‘occupation’.

The Jews of Palestine fought back, of course, and innocent Arabs were killed as well. Gone are the days when we go like lambs to the slaughter, but innocent Arab deaths are equally worthy of condemnation. Nevertheless, current events compel us to be clear: the savagery that has played out in Israel in the past few days was of a piece with the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe, the mob violence perpetrated against the Jews of Baghdad during the Farhud of 1941, and the Nazi massacres of wartime. 

Indeed, the extremist Palestinian leader Amin al-Husseini collaborated with the Nazis in Berlin to synthesise Third Reich antisemitism with the Islamic tradition and pump this noxious propaganda into the Middle East on the wireless and via leaflet campaigns. This added a special poison to the culture of the region, which turned powerfully against the Jews. It was followed by Soviet anti-Israel disinformation, which coined smears like ‘genocide’, ‘white supremacy’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘racism’ about Israel, all of which perpetuate in the cultural bloodstream of the modern west.

‘Apartheid’ was another Soviet smear, and was in circulation several years before a single Israeli was present on the West Bank. As early as 1963, the Arab League’s London magazine, Arab Outlook, included a long essay justifying its economic boycott of the Jewish state. It did so by citing ‘Israeli apartheid’ in a pamphlet called Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, produced by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1965, a full two years before the ‘occupation’. In it, the author, Fayez Sayegh, claimed:

‘The Zionist settler state has learned all the lessons which the various discriminatory regimes of white settler-states in Asia and Africa can teach it…whereas the Afrikaner apostles of apartheid in South Africa, for example, brazenly proclaim their sin, the Zionist practitioners of apartheid in Palestine beguilingly protest their innocence.’ 

Yet there was no occupation. This was a verdict looking for a crime. Israel’s attackers had placed the black cap of the hanging judge on their heads before any crime was committed.

In truth, the atrocities that have so appalled all people of conscience in recent days were not part of any territorial dispute. Not only has there been no ‘occupation’ of Gaza since 2005, the Jewish communities that were attacked so brutally last weekend were located within the internationally mandated borders of Israel. Make no mistake: this was the killing of Jews because they were Jews.

Look at the Hamas murderers parading corpses through the streets. Look at them mutilating bodies and abusing children. Don’t turn away. Look at them mocking and shooting down the elderly. And look at the jubilation that has gripped many Palestinian communities, where residents have danced and handed out sweets, not just in the region but also in Britain and Europe. While there are many decent and honourable Muslims, who comprise our friends and allies, it is impossible to deny that there is a strong element in Palestinian and Arab society that sacralises a cult of bloodshed. This is a difficult fact to face, but evil cannot be defeated by ignoring it.

Yet according to the useful idiots of the left, it is always the fault of the Jews. The Christ killers, the Untermenschen, the colonisers; they are to blame for their own destruction. The final insult, which we insist on delivering, is that time and again, we refuse to die. Am Yisrael chai.

Israelophobia: The newest version of the oldest hatred, by Jake Wallis Simons (Constable, £12.99), is out now

There’s nothing as sad as a bad pub revamp

The Flower Pot in Aston, near Henley, was one of my favourite pubs in the country, a charming, eccentric time capsule cluttered with esoteric decoration: dozens of cases of stuffed fish and animals, angling paraphernalia and Edwardian art; there was even a resident parrot. 

The pub opened in 1890, at almost exactly the same time as the publication of Three Men in a Boat, and in a certain light, after a few drinks, it could feel as though one was actually inhabiting the quirky, late-Victorian England described by Jerome K. Jerome. So when I found myself in the vicinity at the end of the summer, fancying a swim in the Thames from the pub’s own jetty, which is just down a rambling lane from The Flower Pot, and then a pint afterwards, I diverted there. Only to discover it had been utterly ruined.

The first thing I saw on entering was a giant television screen showing Catchphrase. The old dark wood furniture had been dumped and replaced by velvet-covered stools. Gone was most of the trademark taxidermy, replaced by, yes, more wall-mounted TVs as well as garish conceptual art. Gone too was the parrot – though no doubt it had long been pining for the fjords so it may be better off now, unlike the locals. But, most upsettingly, gone was the charm. 

Those behind this desecration, new owners who took over The Flower Pot last year, evidently won’t agree with my critique. ‘The renovation was sensitive to its history and still in keeping with the feel of country house hotel and traditional pub,’ they write. ‘The pub reflects its owners’ passion for art and has kept some of the old taxidermy that formed part of the old character, whilst introducing a modern element.’

I wouldn’t say that a modern element had been ‘introduced’ – it was more a case of modernity steamrolling what had been there for decades. But then the people who destroy atmospheric old pubs always think they’re doing it sensitively. 

The first time I ever experienced this heart-sinking ‘they’ve ruined my pub’ sensation was also the worst time. This was at the Sussex Arms, a 17th-century coaching inn on a mews behind the famous Pantiles arcade in Tunbridge Wells, so named because it stood on the old Kent-Sussex border.

I celebrated my 18th birthday there in December 1984 but in those more carefree times I’d already been going – and getting served – every weekend for the preceding few years. Like The Flower Pot, the old Sussex was cluttered with quaint decorative touches, a trove of random objects hanging from the ceilings as well as the walls, and consequently more than a little dusty. But that was part of its appeal. And that appeal was immense – it was always rammed, with everyone from vicars to Hell’s Angels. 

It was a freehouse but always served the dependable local-ish Harveys. There were open fires. The veteran landlord, Denis Lane, was a provincial version of his famously rude contemporary, Norman Balon, from Soho’s Coach and Horses. Denis would come down to the pub from his rooms upstairs at 9.30 p.m. and whoever was sitting at his favourite table was told to ‘fuck off’. All part of the pub’s earthy charm.  

It felt like the Sussex would be there forever but in 1987, Lane, his health failing, sold up – to developers who wanted to attract a younger crowd. So they ripped out the whole interior, walls as well as fittings, and turned it into a soulless pseudo nightclub. 

They were rewarded with a pub that remained stubbornly empty for several years and had to change hands before it finally started picking up some punters. They then tried to restore some of the lost atmosphere with those ersatz ye olde pub trinkets bought off the peg making it a mediocre impression of what it had once been for real. Meanwhile, the original contents were sold at auction to an entrepreneur who shipped them all to Australia where he recreated an ‘authentic traditional English pub’ 12,000 miles from Tunbridge Wells. 

I’ve never really got over the destruction of the Sussex – and nor have many others who drank there with me. I still aspire to visit its reincarnation down under. 

The Flower Pot and The Sussex Arms are emblematic of the many pubs whose original charm is mourned after modernisation. Prior to my disappointment in Berkshire, the last time this happened for me was at The Wonder in Enfield – what was a delightful neighbourhood boozer last year but now, courtesy of a McMullen’s refit, isn’t. Others ruined by change suggested by friends include The Swan Inn in Chiddingfold, Surrey, The Anchor, further down The Thames, at Bankside in London, The Odd One Out in Colchester and The Windmill in Stratford-on-Avon. But there are doubtless hundreds who have suffered the same fate. 

The depth of feeling for preserving these special places was seen just this summer by the national furore that followed the arson attack and subsequent bulldozing of The Crooked House in Staffordshire. In fairness, with trade being what it is, I feel more than a degree of pity for those trying to make a pub earn its keep just now. And sometimes these drastic revamps must be a desperate last throw-of-the-dice alternative to outright closure. Sometimes though, the lure of change in the hope of reviving fortunes is resisted. 

Returning to Soho’s Coach and Horses, there was a major scare a couple of years ago that the brewery owner was about to tear the place up after evicting the then-managers. It hasn’t happened, remaining almost unchanged, and all the better for it. And it is even possible for the destructive process to work the other way and become restorative. 

I think of The Boleyn Tavern close to the old West Ham ground in Upton Park which has gone from featureless dump to sensitively-restored Edwardian gem – or The Carlton Tavern in Kilburn which was bulldozed by developers who were later forced to rebuild it… and did so remarkably well.  

But these more positive examples are swimming against a tide of heritage dumped. An old Fleet Street news editor I knew had a mantra to cover practically every internal announcement on his title: ‘All change is bad’. It adapts rather well as a catch-all advice to wannabe-designer publicans. 

Is your car snooping on your sex life?

Most drivers have no idea just how much data their vehicles are collecting. The cars of today are less computers on wheels than they are monitoring monstrosities – and some of the spying is truly shocking.

Tech experts at the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit that promotes internet privacy, recently turned their attention to 25 leading car brands, including the likes of Tesla and Nissan. Every single manufacturer they looked at was found to collect far more personal data than is necessary, often about things that have absolutely nothing to do with driving. What is particularly worrying about cars, according to the researchers, is that they ‘have so many more data-collecting opportunities than other products and apps we use – more than even smart devices in our homes or the cell phones we take wherever we go’. 

Modern cars can collect inordinate amounts of personal information, from how you interact with your vehicle, to ‘the connected services you use in your car’. Your car is very often linked to your phone, meaning many car manufacturers can access at least part of what’s on there. In a write-up of the report, the researchers warn that car manufacturers can gather information on a variety of different things, including your sexual proclivities. Some manufacturers – like Audi, Hyundai, and Mercedes Benz, for example – even snoop on the photos on your phone, your calendar, and what you have scheduled on your to-do list.

Manufacturers can gather extra information about you from third-party sources like Google Maps. The researchers note that many of the cars they analysed collect information about the world around you and your car. In other words, your car’s sensors can record information about the outside world (the buildings, the pedestrians, the signs, the weather conditions, etc.) as you drive. This information can be taken by the manufacturers. Some will use it for themselves. Others, meanwhile may decide to sell the information to a third party. 

Nissan, one of the most popular car brands in the world, was ranked as one of the very worst data-abusing offenders, largely because it collects ‘some of the creepiest categories of data the researchers have ever seen’, including information pertaining to your ‘sexual activity’ (the Nissan Qashqai is one of the UK’s most popular cars). Cars can tap into your search history, and many people’s search histories are, for lack of a better word, filthy. The more data they and third parties have on you, the more they know about you. Data is, as the cliché goes, the new oil. Any data, in the eyes of unscrupulous harvesters, is good data. As the authors of the Mozilla report note, car brands might combine the information they have on you with personal data they buy from third parties. ‘Over-collecting, combining, sharing,’ these are all common practices, we’re told. 

Kia, another big brand that is quickly growing in popularity in the UK, also has a penchant for collecting information about your ‘sex life’. Take a quick look at Kia’s privacy policy for owners, and you’ll find that they may have already sold information about your ‘sex life or sexual orientation’ to third parties.

One of the authors of the sobering report, Jen Caltider, tells me that unless we, the drivers, ‘stand up now and demand the car companies do better and put pressure on our elected officials to pass strong, consumer-focused privacy laws,’ then data harvesting will only get worse. ‘If we do nothing and let automotive companies continue on the path they are on – with widespread, rampant data collection, sharing, and selling from vehicles that look more like robots than cars – then in ten years things could be pretty ugly,’ she adds. 

How is the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence changing the data harvesting game? ‘AI,’ she suggests, ‘is certainly speeding up our loss of privacy with the vast amount of data AIs must collect to train their algorithms.’ How bad might it get? ‘As a privacy advocate [I hope] there are still things we consumers can do to demand better privacy protections so our future isn’t as dystopian as we’re all worried it might become.’ In short, the quality and quantity of data collected on you, the driver, is likely to increase. Dramatically so.

Worryingly, when it comes to privacy, Caltider and his colleagues ‘found no good car companies.’ Basically, ‘there was bad and then there was worse, leaving consumers with little good options when buying a new car these days.’ I’m off to buy a new bike.