THE MARCH OF THE UNMENTIONABLES

One pictures the scene in the corridors of power this past weekend, as the reports filtered through: Keir Starmer, lips pursed in that characteristic expression of pained rectitude, staring at footage of ordinary British families processing through London with the sort of horror usually reserved for discovering one has invited the wrong sort to a garden party. Here they were, these dreadful people—workers, pensioners, mothers pushing prams, even a smattering of ethnic minorities who had failed to read the memo about their own oppression—expressing concern about the country they foolishly believed still belonged to them. The sheer cheek of it. One almost expects the Prime Minister to have demanded a recount of reality itself. 

Matthew Goodwin, that tireless cataloguer of the bleeding obvious, did his best to describe what actually occurred at the Unite the Kingdom rally. No rivers of blood, no pogroms, no impromptu book-burnings of The Guardian. Just people. The sort who pay taxes, obey the law, and have begun to notice that their streets, schools, and hospitals increasingly resemble the arrival lounge of an especially chaotic international airport with no departures board. Goodwin called them patriots. The establishment, with its customary lightness of touch, called them far-right. One wonders what the term "far-right" is supposed to mean these days. Once upon a time it denoted chaps in jackboots yearning for a spot of genocide before tea. Now it appears to encompass anyone who wonders whether importing hundreds of thousands of people a year, many from cultures with rather robust views on integration, might eventually have consequences. 

This semantic inflation is a marvellous political technique. It is rather like declaring that anyone who complains about the weather is a "climate denier" while simultaneously insisting that rain is a social construct. Stretch the elastic far enough and it loses all useful tension. Starmer and his colleagues—Sadiq Khan among them, that noted enthusiast for London's vibrant diversity until the wrong sort of vibrancy turns up with Union flags—have been particularly energetic stretchers. They have expanded "far-right" to cover the views of roughly half the native population, or at least those who lack the good grace to applaud their own demographic displacement. 

One must admire the sheer brass of it. Here is a government presiding over record net migration, strained public services, grooming gang scandals swept under various carpets, and neighbourhoods where English is increasingly the second language of the street. And their response to citizens noticing these minor details is to denounce them as extremists. It is gaslighting on an industrial scale, the sort of thing that would make Orwell blush at its crudity. "Nothing to see here," they intone, while deploying thousands of police officers, facial recognition technology, and pre-emptive bans on foreign speakers, just to be on the safe side. One pictures the Met's command centre: a hive of activity not unlike the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, except instead of Klingons the enemy consists of retired accountants from Essex waving flags. 

The spectacle has the delicious absurdity of a Whitehall farce. The political class, comfortably insulated in their Islington redoubts and heavily policed constituencies, lectures the working class about 'hate' while pursuing policies that amount to a slow-motion cultural lobotomy. Uncontrolled mass immigration is not, apparently, the threat. The real danger is the far Left's curious alliance with certain imported theocratic tendencies that view Western freedoms as decadent abominations. But no—best not to notice that. Better to smear Dave the plumber from Bolton as a fascist for wanting his grandchildren to grow up in something recognisably like the country his own grandparents knew.

Starmer himself emerges from this episode looking rather like a man who has mistaken his own propaganda for reality. There he stands, the great defender of working people, the former human rights lawyer, the solemn guardian of British values, casually writing off swathes of the native population as beyond the pale. It is a remarkable transformation. For what we see is not mere political calculation but a deeper, more revealing indifference—an autocrat's chill. He appears to possess no particular affection for the historic British people, those stubborn islanders who built the place he now governs. Their concerns are not to be addressed but pathologized. Their patriotism is not celebrated but pathologized as 'hate.' Their very existence as a coherent demos seems an inconvenience to the grand project of managed demographic change.

One suspects that in the quiet hours, when the red boxes are closed and the spin doctors have retired, Starmer contemplates the electoral mathematics of the future with something approaching private rapture: the prospect of a new, more reliably grateful electorate, less inclined to awkward questions about free speech, women's rights, or why the local park now requires separate hours for different communities. The traditional British working class, with their tiresome attachment to things like fairness, history, and the rule of law, can be dismissed as relics. Far-right, naturally. Problem solved.

This, of course, is where the satire curdles into something bleaker. The real threat to the traditional British way of life has never been a few thousand flag-waving patriots on a Saturday afternoon. It is the combination of ideological fervour from the far Left—eager to dissolve national identity in a warm bath of multiculturalism—and the sheer scale of uncontrolled immigration that makes such dissolution inevitable. The former provides the intellectual justification; the latter supplies the numbers. Starmer's government, like its predecessors, seems content to let both processes accelerate while policing the complaints rather than the causes. 

The march exposed the lie, as Goodwin suggested. Not because the attendees were saints or political philosophers, but because they were so manifestly ordinary. The establishment's hysterical reaction revealed more about its own disconnection than any supposed extremism on the streets. In the end, one is left with the image of a Prime Minister lecturing his own people on hatred while demonstrating a profound lack of love for them. It is not an attractive sight. Britain deserves better than to be governed by men who view its native population as an obstacle to progress rather than its foundation. The patriots, for all their rough edges, at least understand that much. The autocrats, it seems, never will.

KING OF THE NORTH TO LOSE HIS THRONE?

In the great British tradition of political theatre, where ambition is dressed up as public service and the electorate plays the role of a sceptical audience armed with rotten tomatoes, one can only admire the latest plot twist involving Andy Burnham, the self-styled King of the North, and Sir Keir Starmer, the man who makes a cardboard cut-out look like a bundle of raw charisma. Burnham, having long ruled Manchester like a benevolent satrap with a slightly better haircut, has decided the time is ripe to descend from his mayoral throne and contest the Makerfield by-election. The local Labour majority sits at a slender 5,000 or so—thin enough to make a bookmaker nervous—and recent council results saw Reform UK gobbling up seats like a man who has discovered the all-you-can-eat buffet after years of rationing. One is tempted to ask: has Starmer, that master of the quiet knife, engineered a subtle trap for his ambitious colleague? Or is this simply politics as usual, where the gods of electoral arithmetic laugh last and loudest?

Sir Roger Scruton, had he still been with us to sharpen his pen on this particular folly, might have observed that British politics has always been at its most entertaining when it resembles a provincial repertory company performing Macbeth with a budget shortfall. Burnham arrives not as a humble servant of the people but as a figure of almost messianic self-regard, the sort who has spent years cultivating the image of the plain-speaking northerner while presiding over a city that, to the less charitable eye, occasionally suggests a municipal experiment in how many problems one can accumulate while issuing press releases about levelling up. His popularity in Greater Manchester is real enough—local boy made good, photogenic in a hi-vis jacket, capable of delivering a soundbite with the weary gravitas of a man who has seen too many trams delayed. Yet Makerfield is not Manchester. It is the sort of constituency where the phrase "left behind" was practically invented, a place where the abstract promises of Westminster meet the concrete realities of post-industrial life, and where voters have begun, in alarming numbers, to flirt with alternatives that do not involve another lecture on net zero or diversity workshops.

The numbers, as the post in question dryly notes, are not encouraging for the aspiring Prime Minister-in-waiting. A majority of 5,000 in these febrile times is less a cushion than a trampoline—liable to launch the candidate skyward at the first gust of anti-incumbent sentiment. Reform's local successes speak to a deeper rot in the Labour coalition: the old working-class base, long taken for granted, has started to notice that the party of Attlee and Bevan now concerns itself more with pronoun etiquette and international climate summits than with wages, borders, or the price of a pint. One pictures the canvassers trudging through the streets, clipboards in hand, encountering not the deferential voters of yore but citizens who have watched their towns stagnate while the metropolitan commentariat clucks about "populism" as if it were a mysterious virus rather than the entirely predictable immune response of a body politic fed up with being ignored.

Here the sardonic mind turns to Starmer himself, that paragon of cautious competence who somehow contrives to make competence look like a mildly embarrassing condition. Could he have deliberately set Burnham up for a fall? The suggestion has the delicious tang of palace intrigue, the kind that keeps political journalists in overtime and the rest of us in popcorn. Starmer's leadership has been defined by a certain ruthless tidiness—clearing out the Corbynites, triangulating with the centre, and maintaining the expression of a man perpetually disappointed by the shortcomings of reality. Burnham, with his northern power base and telegenic profile, represents a rival centre of gravity. What better way to neutralise a potential leadership challenger than to encourage him into a contest where victory is possible but defeat plausible, preferably splashed across the front pages as a humiliating verdict on "Starmer's Britain"? If Burnham wins, Starmer can claim credit for the masterstroke; if he loses, well, one troublesome prince has been bloodied in the provinces. It is the sort of calculation that would have earned a wry chuckle from the more Machiavellian minds of the Blair era, though one doubts Starmer possesses quite that level of feline cunning. He may simply be relieved that someone else is willing to take the risk while he clings to Number 10 like a limpet on a particularly unyielding rock.

Of course, one must not overstate the conspiracy. British politics runs as much on incompetence and accident as on grand design. Burnham may yet prevail, buoyed by residual loyalty, tactical voting, or the sheer inertia that still propels the Labour machine in its traditional heartlands. The bookies, those cold-eyed realists, seem to fancy his chances. Yet the very fact that a figure of Burnham's stature must fight on such contested ground tells its own story: the Red Wall, once thought rebuilt, is showing fresh cracks. Reform channels a discontent that the main parties dismiss at their peril—part economic anxiety, part cultural revolt, part sheer exasperation with a governing class that lectures more than it listens. In Makerfield, the voters will not be choosing between nuanced policy platforms so much as delivering a verdict on whether Westminster still speaks their language.

One is left reflecting, in the best Scrutonian tradition, on the absurdity of it all. Here is modern Britain: a former mayor eyeing the premiership via a by-election in a marginal seat, while the actual Prime Minister navigates scandals and slumps with the air of a man wondering why the script keeps deviating from the focus-grouped version. The electorate, meanwhile, watches with the jaundiced eye of theatregoers who have seen too many revivals. Whoever triumphs in Makerfield, the larger drama continues—the slow, often comic unravelling of certainties that once seemed as solid as the mills and mines that built these towns. Politics, as ever, provides the entertainment. The joke, as usual, is on all of us.

HANTA LA VISTA, BABY

One can only admire the stamina of our international health bureaucracy. Like a ageing actor who has played Hamlet once too often, the World Health Organization has returned to the stage with a new production, this time featuring not a melancholy Dane but a rodent-borne virus that has had the temerity to appear on a cruise ship. The MV Hondius, a vessel whose very name sounds like a suppressed sneeze, has become the unlikely theatre for this drama. Some nine cases, three deaths, passengers from twenty-plus countries, contact tracing, quarantines, and the faint but unmistakable whiff of another opportunity for the great and the good to demonstrate their indispensability. 

Dr David Bell, a man with the weary air of someone who has seen this particular farce before, points out the obvious with the sort of bluntness that used to be mistaken for common sense. Hantavirus, in its various guises, infects somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 people a year across the globe. Most of it comes from rodents doing what rodents do best: leaving little gifts in corners where humans would rather not look. The fatality rate can be grim in certain strains, but the disease has been plodding along for decades without requiring the mobilisation of the planetary nervous system. Yet here we are, with the WHO fanning the embers of a cluster into something resembling a conflagration. One is reminded of that line from the old master: the louder the protestations of urgency, the stronger the suspicion that something else is being sold. 

The strain in question is the Andes variety, which possesses the rare and thrilling ability to pass, on occasion, from one human to another—usually after the sort of prolonged close contact that cruise ships, with their shared buffets and confined corridors, regrettably facilitate. This is not nothing. Three people have died, and one does not mock tragedy. But nor does one pretend that a handful of cases on a floating retirement home constitutes the opening act of the next great extinction event. The CDC itself, not normally accused of reckless insouciance, rates the public risk as low. The passengers are being dispersed under appropriate precautions, and the rest of us are invited to return to our lives without immediately donning hazmat suits to collect the post.

Yet the machinery grinds on. Notifications, alerts, disembarkations in Tenerife, the inevitable talk of treaties and preparedness. One pictures the conference rooms in Geneva, the earnest slides, the polite applause for yet another framework that will require funding, coordination, and—most importantly—more of the same people who brought us the previous performance now taking a victory lap for their vigilance. Bill Gates, that tireless philanthropist whose fortune seems to expand in direct proportion to global health anxiety, has interests in this area, as does the broader ecosystem of vaccine development. Malaria continues its patient work of killing some 2,000 people daily; tuberculosis around 4,000. These lack the glamour of a cruise ship outbreak. They are simply there, year after year, like reliable character actors who never quite make the poster.

The satire writes itself. In 2020 we were treated to the spectacle of the world locking itself down with a unanimity that would have impressed the more ambitious emperors of old. Models predicted mountains of corpses; television screens filled with graphs climbing like Jacob’s ladders; experts appeared hourly to remind us that we were all in this together, preferably six feet apart. The public, to its eventual regret, largely complied. Economies were torched, education disrupted, mental health collateralised, and a great many liberties accepted as temporary inconveniences. We were told it was science. It was often modelling, politics, and fear dressed up in a white coat.

This time, however, the audience has read the script. The replies to Toby Young’s post and the broader murmur online carry the unmistakable tone of people who have seen the sequel and recognise the same director. “We’re not buying it,” as one succinctly put it. The trust that was squandered so profligately during the coronavirus years has not been magically replenished. People remember the shifting goalposts, the suppressed debates, the economic devastation handed out with the breezy assurance that experts knew best. They remember, too, how certain interests—pharmaceutical, technological, administrative—profited handsomely while small businesses and the young bore the brunt. A cynicism has set in, and cynicism, for all its sourness, can sometimes function as a healthy immune response. There is something almost touching about the WHO’s persistence. Like a missionary in a land grown sceptical of miracles, it continues to preach the gospel of coordinated global action against the latest zoonotic interloper. Hantavirus on a cruise ship! Quick, dust off the pandemic agreement, convene the working groups, prepare the communications strategy. One almost expects Tedros himself to appear on deck in a hazmat suit, striking a solemn pose for the cameras. The optics are irresistible: decisive leadership in the face of a novel-ish threat. Never mind that the novelty is mostly in the setting, not the pathogen.

The language of emergency is seductive because it flatters the emergency-mongers. It turns bureaucrats into heroes, modellers into prophets, and the rest of us into grateful extras. Yet reality has a stubborn habit of intruding. Most hantavirus remains a rural, rodent-afflicted affair. The Andes strain’s person-to-person transmission is real but limited, requiring the sort of intimacy that does not scale easily to continents. The cruise ship cluster is a genuine if contained misfortune—precisely the sort of incident public health systems should handle with quiet competence rather than orchestral fanfares. The public, one senses, has grown tired of being cast as the perpetual victim in these morality plays. They have mortgages, jobs, children to raise, and a healthy suspicion that the next round of restrictions, digital IDs, or “benefit-sharing” mechanisms for pathogens will serve everyone except them. The lesson of 2020 was not that viruses do not exist or that precautions are always foolish. It was that fear is a potent political solvent, and those who wield it rarely surrender the tool voluntarily.

So here we are again: a handful of cases on a ship, three tragic deaths, and the machinery of panic revving its engine with familiar enthusiasm. The difference this time is the audience. They have seen the show. They know the plot twists. And they are, in increasing numbers, refusing to applaud on cue. In the long run, that may be the healthiest development of all. A public that has recovered its scepticism is harder to lead by the nose, even when the nose is pointed firmly toward Geneva. The rodents will keep doing what they do. The question is whether we will let the human ones do the same.