Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

No, not quite. It's just that we have stopped being under the delusion that the Americans are a reliable ally and a reliable trading partner.

Also less likely to lecture you about antisemitism. 

I'd thought about posting this but hadn't because I couldn't really think of a thread about it - but I think this attitude is possibly dangerously blind to what's going on on the American right/internet with anti-semitism which matters because we live on America's internet. So there may need to be a bit of self-lecturing too. From the Times:

Daniel Finkelstein: How the world's antisemites turned on me
The Times columnist's mother survived Bergen-Belsen. When far-right activist Nick Fuentes began spreading antisemitic, pro-Hitler ideas, our writer challenged him. He wasn't ready for the onslaught that ensued


Daniel Finkelstein at the West London Synagogue, where his parents were married
TOM JACKSON FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE
Tuesday February 10 2026, 5.00am, The Times

About a year before my mother died, she came to my sons' school to give a talk about her life. She was already pretty frail by then and needed me to take her there in a wheelchair. The pupils were totally gripped but her powers — that lovely open, captivating way she had of telling a story — were clearly on the wane. And as I listened, I realised I was seeing the last of all the many talks she had given.

I understood a little of what that might mean for me. I knew my duty. I would have to tell her story for her. And I set to work on a book about her experiences and those of my father.

Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad told of my mother's near-death and ultimate survival in Bergen-Belsen, of the death from starvation and disease of my grandmother, and of my family and their neighbours who died in the gas chambers. It followed my father and grandparents to a Siberian gulag and slave labour on a state collective farm. It followed Mum and Dad to the peace and stability of life round the corner from Brent Cross shopping centre.

And when it was published I ended up travelling round the country, doing some of the speeches Mum wasn't here to do.

So, yes, I saw quite a while ago that the passing of my parents' generation would leave a gap to be filled and I have been trying to fill it. But I realise now that I entirely misunderstood the scale and nature of the hole there would be. I had thought it was primarily an organisational issue. That it was mainly about finding the time and my brother-in-law editing films of Mum and Dad's witness, so our children could use them in talks.

In fact, the problem was far more profound. The problem was not really about how the story would be told, but how it would be received. To a rising generation, what happened to my parents had become distant history, like the Battle of Waterloo or the American Civil War. A subject to be read about in a textbook or revised for an exam.

The idea that it might have political significance had begun to seem an absurd notion, like using the Bayeux Tapestry as a warning to have a checkup with your optician.

This first began to dawn on me when I saw the re-emergence of stupid economic ideas that the Cold War had totally discredited. But I only grasped it properly when I had a tangle with a man called Nick Fuentes.

A couple of months ago, the egregious American talk-show host Tucker Carlson announced that his latest guest would be the 27-year-old leader of a right-wing online cult known as the Groypers. Nick Fuentes has built a large following through provocative monologues and exchanges with his followers. What he comes out with is pretty wild. Let's just say he doesn't like women or black people or gays.

Most of all, however, he doesn't like Jews. He really doesn't.

Hitler, on the other hand, he's pretty fond of. He has said he is on Team Hitler. That Hitler was "cool". And his idea is that America — and the idea of America First — has been subverted by Jews who put Israel first. Half the time when you listen to Fuentes you are depressed to learn how awful we Jews are; the rest of the time you find out that we are so brilliant that we run the world.

Anyway, Tucker Carlson decided that this was someone we needed to hear more from. So he invited him on for a gentle interview in which the main thrust was how a group of Jews had tried to "cancel" Fuentes. Throughout this Carlson gave his famous baffled look, unable to imagine what anyone could possibly have against his guest. The whole Team Hitler thing didn't come up. Carlson clearly ran out of space. Maybe the internet was full up. I suppose you can't cover everything.

This extraordinary encounter is unfortunately not an isolated occurrence. It's part of a trend. The idea that Jews are in control of America is spreading on the right, a counterpart to the left idea that world governments are under Zionist occupation. It has become an open part of political debate among American conservatives, alarmingly.

Apparently, we Jews are everywhere and in charge of everything. Fascinatingly, when the podcaster Joe Rogan was asked how many Jews there were in the world, he said that as there are 7 billion people in the world there are probably 1 billion Jews. There are in fact 8 billion people and fewer than 16 million Jews.

Or to put it another way, 99.98 per cent of the world's population is not Jewish. Every time I see a fellow Jew in a restaurant I tell them to eat more quickly; with so few of us, we can't waste time on eating when there is so much dominating required from each Jew.

The Carlson interview prompted Piers Morgan to challenge Fuentes to come on his show. His idea was to put to him all the points Carlson had failed to ask. And I offered to help. I provided a short video, which I filmed in my kitchen, briefly summarising my family story and suggesting to Fuentes that he should be on "Team Mum" rather than "Team Hitler".

I didn't expect, and neither did Morgan, that Fuentes would respond to this video by sending me an apology, agreeing to go on a course and donating to my synagogue. That wasn't the idea. It was more to expose the things that he and his followers have been talking about in a way that Carlson had deliberately failed to do.

Even before Fuentes appeared, and certainly after it, there were many people who thought it a mistake, or even outrageous, to give him any sort of platform. I think these people are making a reasonable point and I understand it, but I don't think they are right. They are failing to understand how the modern media works.

Even if it were desirable to deny Fuentes a platform, it isn't possible. He has his own platform and a vast number of young followers. Beyond these groupies is an even larger audience that is receptive to his America First message and the idea that the United States is being undermined by rich and powerful Jews. If we shut our eyes to this, it doesn't go away.

There is, of course, another argument: this is an American problem and not mine. I see this too, but again it fails to grasp reality. Social media means that political ideas that circulate in the United States circulate here too. Young people here — actually, not just young people — are passionately engaged with rows happening in the US. The death of George Floyd had a huge impact on British political life. And there were people marching around chanting, "Hands up, don't shoot!" at the British police, a slogan that originated in a police shooting in Missouri and ignores the fact that British officers are mostly unarmed.

So I thought it was important to take on Fuentes. And I appreciated that he wouldn't back down and that what resulted might be unpleasant. But still.

Fuentes is a clever man. He knows what moves an audience and he appreciated instantly the power of the story I was telling. He couldn't give me any quarter and he didn't. He repeated that he thought Hitler was cool. Then he mocked my accent (using Dick Van Dyke's Mary Poppins voice), said the British probably had a slang for Holocaust and, starting on the Morgan programme, began to mimic me saying, "Me mum died in the Holly."

In so far as he had an argument, it was that the Holocaust was completely irrelevant to him and his generation. There was nothing to be learnt from it. He wasn't going to be put off blaming the Jews for all societies' ills by the fact that at some point in history a similar argument had led Hitler to kill some British bloke's grandmother.

Almost instantly I was flooded — on social media, on my email — with taunting messages. There were thousands of them. It went on for weeks. And I am still getting them.

Your dad is a lampshade and your mum is a bar of soap (or a pair of shoes) was a pretty common one. I was sent pictures with my parents' faces superimposed on light fittings. Someone made a song called Me Mum Died in the Holly. Someone else turned that into a video with an AI-generated Hitler doing the singing. An account was set up on X called @ilovegaschambers that collected together the more creative insults. I became a meme.

The posts slavishly followed Fuentes. In American movies that feature a bully in the high-school canteen, there are usually two moronic sidekicks standing just behind him and repeating his "jokes". This was a similar phenomenon, just with a cast of thousands.

People also used Grok, Elon Musk's AI tool, to ask how I could have been born in 1962 if I said that my mother had died in Belsen. I had of course said nothing of the sort. It was kind of interesting, as well as alarming, to watch a conspiracy theory at its birth.

It has slowed down now, but it hasn't stopped. It's a rare day without several encounters with this sort of stuff. Only yesterday I had someone with multiple phone numbers sending me text messages about how I was a dirty Jew who should expect imminent arrest in the Epstein scandal.

And I was right that political arguments that begin in the US come here pretty quickly. I started to notice that some of the "Holly" memes were from accounts in the UK. But soon a more intellectual version began to appear. Hitler was absent, there was no mention of soap, but there was the suggestion that I should be deported.

The thrust of these messages, hundreds this time rather than thousands, is that it is deeply hypocritical of me to believe that there should be a country for Jews (Israel) but not for English people.

I tried rational argument. I pointed out that I did want a country for English people, that we had one and I live in it. I also said that Israel wasn't exclusively for Jews and that it wouldn't need to exist in the first place if there weren't so many people interested in deporting me. But in the end I found these exchanges as unavailing as it would be to argue with someone who called the Holocaust "the Holly".

What would my parents have thought of all this? They would definitely have agreed it was right to confront it. That's what my grandfather had done in Germany in the Twenties and Thirties, after all. They would have been realistic. Because Jews are a small minority in almost every country in which they settle, this kind of antisemitism has lasted for hundreds of years and always been dangerous.

They would also definitely have found it upsetting. Anyone would. Particularly the fact that it comes from young people in the United States, because the young and Americans were people they believed in.

But one of the most important things about both of them is that they had a sense of proportion. They were never complacent. Yet they weren't going to live their lives as victims, despite what had happened to them. They wouldn't want me too either. And I won't.

In the history of civilisation, I don't think there's been a better time to be alive or a better place to live than now and here. I think that's an objectively defensible statement. But it's also how I feel.

My parents didn't just survive. They lived. And I am doing that too.

He has been sharing some of the memes. The one I saw was truly repulsive (the bar of soap one). It has now been removed which I suppose is good and indicates that even Twitter has some line you can't cross - but in a way I'm not sure as I actually think it was worth seeing having just read that article. I'm sure if you search online you can see it.

[Jacob]

I do sometimes wonder why people like Raz and OvB who fling charges of anti-semitism at everone to the left of Mitt Romney at the drop of a hat are so seemingly unconcerned about people like Fuentes.

I guess it doesn't cross their social media feeds for some reason?

[Richard Hakluyt]

I think it is easier to see political complexity in the country in which one is resident. No doubt they are aware of American antisémites but also that they are a minority. Just as I am aware of a disturbing increase in antisemitism in the UK but also fail to meet an antisémite irl from one decade to the next.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Fuentes isn't attacking Jews on the street, isn't chanting for genocide out in front of synagogues. He is an admitted incel and is taken far more seriously by people who think he is some grave threat to society als Julius Streicher than he is in conservatism writ large. Most conservatives don't know who he is unless they are young, very online, or someone who is a general political junkie.

He has way less political influence than someone like Jeremy Corbyn, Zohan Mamdani, Francesca Albanese etc.

[Jacob]

I see. I disagree with your risk assessment, but thank you.

[Razgovory]

I do sometimes wonder why people like Raz and OvB who fling charges of anti-semitism at everone to the left of Mitt Romney at the drop of a hat are so seemingly unconcerned about people like Fuentes.

I guess it doesn't cross their social media feeds for some reason?

I posted something about how Fuentes and his ilk are taking over the GOP last week.  You even commented on it.  I see it constantly on the social media.  I'm well aware of the rot going on in my country.  However, it seems that quite a few people here are very resistant to seeing the same problem in their own countries.

[HVC]

I do sometimes wonder why people like Raz and OvB who fling charges of anti-semitism at everone to the left of Mitt Romney at the drop of a hat are so seemingly unconcerned about people like Fuentes.

I guess it doesn't cross their social media feeds for some reason?

Raz's fight is against the white liberal left. The antisemitism obsession is just his easy cudgel. He doesn't care about right wing antisemitism to anywhere near the same degree because he doesn't actually care about antisemitism if he can't use it in his personal crusade.

[Grey Fox]

How very realist of you 

Soz

Yeah that's probably right.

The difference is that the US' posture is changing rapidly and we don't know where or when it'll stop changing rapidly. That makes it less reliable.

I agree with a lot of what you wrote. And I think you might be right on this too. But I think there may be a difference in how we view the upside of reliable, strategic and hostile to unreliable and occasionally hostile (but fundamentally unpredictable/changeable/chaotic).

So with China - I think there is also possibly a difference looking at this from a Canadian or a European perspective.

As a European, we don't have much in the way of natural resources and we do not have a significant extraction sector. Our economic appeal to China lies in technical know-how (particularly in high-end manufacturing - see the recent attempt to takeover an important Dutch chips firm, after the blocked attempt to takeover a similar Welsh firm, and also all of Germany I also couldn't help but note that one of the big "deals" announced on Starmer's trip to Beijing was a £15 billion JV with Astra-Zeneca - and life sciences is one of the target sectors for China to develop in the latest five year plan) and our market. But with the dual circulation strategy China's economic policy would further de-industrialise Europe while increasing European dependency on China economically. That's not an accident or an incidental sideproduct - it is the strategy.

At the same time China's industry and state is increasing its support for Russia. The Estonian intelligence assessment you posted noted that Sino-Russian cooperation has "significantly deepened" in the last four years in energy, trade, finance, transport, logistics, science, technology and education. Chinese manufacturing (including of things like chips and high-end electronics) is heavily supporting the development of Russia's growing drone capacity. Russia has increased its manufacturing of shells to 7 million per year, as well as acquiring shells from Iran and North Korea - while China isn't directly supplying them, there's lots of evidence that China is supplying the industrial equipment, the assembly lines etc.

At this point Europe has successfully hit its target of manufacturing 2 million shells per year for Ukraine ahead of target (2027), which is good but needs to be put next to the resource capacity of the enemy. And this is where these two are combined. There is economic route for Europe to work more with China that does not involve Europe's further de-industrialisation, reducing European capacity to defend itself or support Ukraine. And I think there is ultimately no route to that that doesn't involve a (possibly Chinese brokered) rapprochement with Russia, betraying Ukraine and possibly opening Europe's own states to coercion and attack.

I accept all the criticism of Trump and the US on this and everything else that is explored in-depth across Languish. But in my view, from a European perspective, that's the alternative we'd be dealing with.

I think things are different if you're Canadian. In part because Trump is threatening Canadian sovereignty (I imagine similar for the Danes). But also because Canada is American and like other American states - and, say, Australia and some African states - Canada has resources that China wants and needs and a robust extraction sector. So Canada has more leverage economically and there may be space within that to preserve or build up Canadian industry. Similarly I don't think the route to China runs through Russia in quite the way it does for Europe, so again I think Canada has space that Europe doesn't - though I think we should be clear-eyed about where Canadian trade with China would end up and a portion of it would be drones above Zaporizhia and Russian assembly lines making shells.

Of course not, but political and morality narratives are deeply interwoven with material economic forces and cannot be discounted. They function as explanatory frameworks the justify action and cannot be dismissed.

Propaganda, morality, and politics (individual and aggregate) have always mattered. This remains true in the age of social media and instant global mass communication.

So I think I disagree. I think the political and morality narratives are constructed out of the material economic reality. They are the ideology that certain material realities produce and reproduce. I think we could have fantastic propaganda, clean social media etc and we would still be facing a form of political disintegration (though I agree it might have different characteristics) because what is driving it is the end of the economic and security structure that produced the previous political order.

But I also wonder if we're talking about slightly different things in that I think you're meaning more as analytical/explanatory tools or propaganda, whereas I think I'm meaning maybe more normative forces - if that distinction makes sense?

And I'd add there's maybe a further level which is sort of aesthetics/vibes politics - which I think is a large part of how Europe got here. Look at Angela Merkel: austerity across Europe that resulted in the decimation of Europe's renewables sector (where we had a global lead - now taken by China) and huge cuts to defence spending (it had held up in the 2000s as Europe was more involved in Afghanistan), Minsk agreements (today is the anniversary of Minsk II) and the key point person for the West on dealing with Putin, shutting off nuclear which (combined with the decimation of the renewables sector) left a Europe more dependent on energy imports (which would come from Russia primarily - and now Trump's America) as well as more carbon intensive (as well as resulting in industrial energy costs that are twice what they are in the US or China) and an economic strategy predicated on ever deeper ties to China. Impeccable vibes/aesthetics: the new "leader of the free world", an adult, a "grown up in the room" etc. In terms of policy outcomes: catastrophic on basically every front. In part, I'd argue, because it was operating at a level above and entirely disconnected from the material economic reality: where are things produced, who owns those factories, where do the materials and energy inputs come from, who has coercive power.

Yes and no and maybe but I mostly think this is Trump derangement making everything appear bigger than they really are.

Canada spent a decade being the US lapdog while also trying to do for China what PET did for Cuba. We're just trying to go back to a relationship where they buy our stuff and we can buy theirs. It's 49k cars for access to their Canola market. It's no CUSMA. 

[Razgovory]

I do sometimes wonder why people like Raz and OvB who fling charges of anti-semitism at everone to the left of Mitt Romney at the drop of a hat are so seemingly unconcerned about people like Fuentes.

I guess it doesn't cross their social media feeds for some reason?

Raz's fight is against the white liberal left. The antisemitism obsession is just his easy cudgel. He doesn't care about right wing antisemitism to anywhere near the same degree because he doesn't actually care about antisemitism if he can't use it in his personal crusade.

 

[Razgovory]

Fascist and Nazi are not synonymous. Though I should have said "white Nationalists" rather than "Nazi", to be more accurate. Very few of those in China, but quite a few in the current US government. If I were Jewish, I wouldn't put much trust in the current US.

You have a point, a POC who puts troublesome minorities in camps and forcibly sterilizes them is much more trustworthy than an American.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Its not like the US isn't rife with antisemitism.
Not that this excuses the European politicians who open the borders for endless amounts of islamics.

[garbon]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c8x90q9nyzyt?post=asset%3A235ac9c6-d9d9-43a3-86f3-3e3684d56e72#post

Palestine Action ban ruled unlawful but group remains proscribed for now

Former home secretary did not follow her own policies, High Court told

The High Court said that when the former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper decided to ban the organisation last June, she had failed to first take into account what impact that decision would have on the right to protest.

They also said she had not fully followed her own policies regarding the test for when an organisation should be proscribed under the Terrorism Act.

Prior to the ban, the group's volunteers had been breaking into arms firms linked to Israel, leading to charges of criminal damage.

Terrorism legislation permits ministers to ban a group which causes serious damage to property in order to further their cause.

The High Court ruled that the organisation had no human rights defence to those incidents.

But the judge said that a critical issue in the case was whether the ban was impacting the rights of others to protest in support of Palestinian issues.

"We accept that the fact of proscription and the heavy penalties for [terrorism offences] will mean that it is reasonable to expect people to be risk averse, to adjust their behaviour and to avoid doing things that run any significant risk that they might commit any of those criminal offences," Dame Victoria Sharp said.

The judges said that while "a very small number" of Palestine Action's activities met the legal test for acts of terrorism, the standard criminal law could be used to confront the group.

[Sheilbh]

They're right - it's insane that they've been classified as a terrorist organisation.

I've more mixed views on the recent acquittals.

[Richard Hakluyt]

I have suspicions that the recent acquittals are a consequence of the government's stupidity in proscribing the organisation.

Like many I don't like them but calling every thing you don't like terrorism is the fast lane to tyranny.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah - I totally agree.

I also think it's a bit like the BLM protesters in Bristol - and I think this is the difference with, say, Lucy Connelly. If you plead not guilty to what can be seen as a "speech crime" and take it to a jury, British juries are incredibly reluctant to convict. If you plead guilty and it just goes to the judg for sentencing, they will throw the book. (The one exception to this seems to be the Just Stop Oil people who the public really just seem to hate for causing inconvenience ) It's not the only reason but one of the reasons I'm very dubious on removing the right to a jury trial on indictable or either-way offences.

My slight issue is that in this "protest" a policewoman was attacked with a sledgehammer and paralysed for three months - and that attack is all on camera. I think that is a serious crime that should have been punished.