KNIVES OUT FOR KIPPUR

In the annals of British understatement, few events can rival the quiet efficiency with which a man of Syrian descent chose Yom Kippur— that most introspective of Jewish holidays, when one is meant to atone for sins rather than dodge them—to mount an assault on a Manchester synagogue. Picture the scene, if you will: the faithful gathered in Heaton Park, murmuring prayers under a sky the colour of oversteeped tea, only for the reverie to be shattered by the obliging roar of a car engine and the subsequent enthusiasm of a knife. Two men, Adrian Daulby, fifty-three, and Melvin Cravitz, sixty-six, lay dead by the end of it, their final acts apparently heroic enough to keep the worst of the carnage at bay.

One of them, we learn with that peculiar British blend of apology and inevitability, may even have been despatched by the very police marksmen who arrived to save the day, a detail that adds a touch of farce to the tragedy, as if the scriptwriters for this national production had briefly nodded off over their Earl Grey. The attacker, a chap already under investigation for rape—because why not layer the ironies?—had been released on bail, naturally, in keeping with our enlightened policy of treating potential terrorists as if they were merely overdue on a library fine.

It was, in short, a hell of a situation, as Dr. Philip Kiszely put it in a tweet that same afternoon, his words landing like a well-aimed custard pie in the face of institutional complacency. "The government and institutions," he declared, "are anti-British, anti-Semitic and anti-Western—in something like that order. They also loathe the white working class." One could almost hear the collective shuffle of discomfort in Whitehall, that familiar rustle of trouser legs as the great and good adjust their progressive halos. For Kiszely, a cultural historian with the air of a man who has read too many footnotes to suffer fools gladly, this was no mere outburst but a cri de coeur from a nation teetering on the edge of its own irrelevance. And who could blame him? In a country where the response to slaughter in the streets is to urge the cancellation of a pro-Palestinian march the following weekend—lest the grief of British Jews be overshadowed by chants of solidarity with their would-be exterminators—we have perfected the art of moral arbitrage to a degree that would make even Pontius Pilate blush.

Let us pause here, dear reader, for a moment of sardonic reflection, in the manner of those Edwardian essayists who could dissect a social ill while sipping their hock. Britain's establishment, that creaking edifice of Oxbridge alumni and think-tank apparatchiks, has long prided itself on a tolerance so boundless it verges on self-parody. We are, after all, the nation that once ruled a quarter of the globe not through brute force alone—though there was plenty of that—but through the subtle alchemy of tea, cricket, and the firm belief that everyone, deep down, secretly yearns for a spot of Anglican restraint. Yet here we are, in the autumn of 2025, watching as our open borders disgorge not the huddled masses of Emma Lazarus's poem, but a procession of cultural incompatibilities that make the arrival of William the Conqueror look like a neighbourhood block party. Consider, if you dare, the grooming gangs, those spectral horrors that haunt the pages of our tabloids like unquiet ghosts from a Dickensian nightmare. Just two days before the Manchester outrage, seven men—predominantly of Pakistani heritage, though the press is careful to whisper it—were bundled off to prison for a collective 174 years, their crimes a grim litany of rape and exploitation visited upon two vulnerable girls in Rochdale, starting when they were a tender thirteen.

Rochdale: the name alone evokes a shudder, a syllable freighted with the memory of scandals past, from the Jay Report's tally of 1,400 victims in Rotherham alone to the systemic blindness that allowed such abominations to fester for decades. And what was the institutional response? A shuffling of feet, a murmured apology for "lessons learned," and then—poof!—back to the business of inclusion. Sexual abuse, it seems, is a reasonable price to pay for multiculturalism, much as one might tip a sommelier for a flawed vintage. Kiszely nails it with brutal economy: "They just shuffled uncomfortably at the Pakistani gang-rape of white children." Indeed, the authorities did more than shuffle; they pirouetted, rebranding predation as a "safeguarding challenge" and the victims as collateral in the grand narrative of diversity. One imagines the Home Office mandarins, gathered around their PowerPoint slides, nodding sagely as they recalibrate the optics: "Yes, the rapes are regrettable, but think of the vibrant street food!"

This is not, of course, to single out any one community for calumny—God forbid we descend into the very bigotry the bien pensants so tirelessly police—but to observe, with the dry detachment of a coroner's report, how our leaders have elevated denial to a high art. Muggings, knife crime, honour killings, first-cousin marriages, female genital mutilation: Kiszely lists them like items on a particularly depressing menu, all washed down with the bile of "third-world hell on earth" now routine in London, Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham. And why not? We have open borders, after all, that leaky sieve through which the world's unfiltered detritus pours, unchecked by anything so vulgar as policy. The white working class—those gammon-faced relics of a bygone empire, sneered at in the pages of the Guardian as if they were evolutionary cul-de-sacs—bear the brunt, their neighbourhoods transformed into no-go zones where the Union Jack flutters like a distress signal. "They sneer and call us gammon," Kiszely writes, and one can picture the liberal elite, ensconced in their Islington townhouses, chuckling over their oat milk lattes at the very thought.

Yet it is the antisemitism that cuts deepest, a venomous undercurrent that has surged through Britain's veins since the Hamas atrocities of October 2023, turning the streets into a theatre of the absurd. The Community Security Trust, that vigilant watchdog of Jewish safety, recorded over 4,000 incidents in the year following the attack—a 147% leap that would make even the most optimistic actuary reach for the smelling salts. Marches for Palestine—those vast, baying processions of keffiyeh-clad enthusiasts—snake through London week after week, their chants a discordant hymn to intifada, even as synagogues shutter their doors and Jewish schoolchildren learn to scan the crowds for threats. And on the very day of the Manchester slaughter? Why, the faithful were out in force again, or so the timetable suggests, their placards fluttering like confetti at a funeral.

"They allowed Jew-hate marches on the same day Jews were slaughtered in the street," Kiszely laments, and one cannot help but admire the precision of the phrase, evoking as it does the ghost of Enoch Powell's rivers of blood, now augmented with the acrid tang of petrol and cordite. Ah, but to accuse the state of outright antisemitism would be to grant it a coherence it scarcely possesses. No, this is something altogether more insidious: a reflexive anti-Westernism, a loathing for one's own inheritance so profound it masquerades as virtue. The institutions—those cathedrals of bureaucracy from the BBC to the civil service—have internalized the dogma of intersectionality to the point where Jews, inconveniently non-oppressed in the narrative, become expendable. The white working class? Even more so, their patriotism dismissed as 'far-right xenophobia', their concerns about cultural erosion waved away as the grumblings of the unenlightened. It is a hierarchy of hatreds, as Kiszely astutely orders it: anti-British first, then antisemitic, with anti-Western bringing up the rear like a tipsy uncle at a wedding. And so we arrive at the heart of the matter, that desperate triad of imperatives with which Kiszely concludes his jeremiad: "I want the rotten edifice to come crashing down. Let’s rip it up and start again. Look to a completely different future—that holds to its heart something of our wonderful past." 

There is poetry in the plea, a echo of Shelley’s "Ode to the West Wind," but laced with the grim realism of a man who has seen too many footnotes turn to ash. Rip it up? One imagines the spectacle: Parliament reduced to rubble, the Home Office repurposed as a car park, the liberal commentariat scattered like confetti in a gale. A new future, yes, but one mindful of the old—the scones and the sonnets, the stiff upper lip and the sly understatement that once made us the envy of less fortunate isles. Yet herein lies the sardonic twist, the punchline to this national joke. For if real change does not come—and let us not hold our breath, given the current incumbents' talent for inertia—then Kiszely and "millions like me" will have no choice but to leave. Emigrate to the sun-kissed shores of Australia, perhaps, or the orderly burghers of Canada, there to sip flat whites and reminisce about the old country over barbecued prawns. "I don’t want to exist in Mogadishu, UK," he writes, and the image lingers: minarets piercing the fog of the Thames, halal butchers supplanting the chip shops, and the last red phone box repurposed as a call to prayer. It is a vision not merely dystopian but defiantly absurd, a Britain unmoored from its moorings, adrift in a sea of its own making. In the end, one cannot help but laugh, albeit through gritted teeth, at the spectacle. 

We, who once exported civilization like a particularly fine claret, now import its contraries with the zeal of converts. The attackers sharpen their knives, the marchers raise their voices, and the institutions shuffle on, ever polite, ever progressive, ever blind. It is Clive James himself who might have summed it up best, in one of those late-night reveries on the telly: "The British genius for compromise has finally compromised us out of existence." Or, as Kiszely might rephrase it over a pint in some imagined pub of the future: "F**king hell, let's not even think about it." But think we must, lest the only future we salvage is one where the past is but a whisper, and the present a very long scream indeed.

PATRICK MURRAY (1956 - 2025): AN OBITUARY

Patrick Murray, the king of the cheeky chancer, shuffled off this mortal coil with the sort of understated aplomb that would have had Del Boy nodding approvingly. He was 68, felled by the lung cancer he'd been thumbing his nose at since 2021, a foe that returned in 2023 like an uninvited relative at a Trotters' family do. No dramatic finale for Paddy—just a quiet announcement on October 2, 2025, leaving Peckham a shade less colourful and the nation's VHS collections a touch more nostalgic.

Born in Greenwich on December 17, 1956, to a family where dreams were as practical as a three-wheeled van, young Patrick dodged the docks for drama school, emerging in 1973 with a grin that could sell ice to penguins. Early gigs in gritty fare like Scum (1977)—where he sparred with a pre-fame Ray Winstone—and Quadrophenia (1979), mod mosh pit and all, honed his gift for the lovable lout. But it was 1983 when lightning struck: as Mickey Pearce in Only Fools and Horses, the wheeler-dealer's wide-boy sidekick, all dodgy schemes and daft asides. He was the perfect foil to Del's delusions—ever the mug punter, yet somehow wiser than he let on.

Satire? Mickey embodied it: the eternal optimist in a world of bent spanners, proving that in Peckham, hope floats on a tide of mild disappointment. Off-screen, Murray's life was pure pearly gates fodder. Films like Breaking Glass (1980) and The Firm (1989) showcased his range—from punky pathos to football hooligan heft—while telly turns in Bergerac and Lovejoy kept the wolf from the door. But when acting dried up, he swapped spotlight for steering wheel, hacking cabs to fund visas for his Thai wife Anong and daughter Josie, outfoxing Theresa May's 2012 rules with the cunning of a man who'd once flogged hooky watches to coppers.

But, spare a sardonic thought for today's luvvies, preening on prestige platforms while Paddy embodied the everyman rogue—warm as a pint, sharp as a Stanley knife. COPD nipped at his heels in 2018, but he soldiered on, remission a fleeting heist until the big one caught up. He leaves a legacy of laughter lines etched in British sitcom gold: proof that the finest comedy needs no capes, just a cockney shrug and a heart of unvarnished oak. Cushty, Patrick. He who dares... wins the applause.

THE [SECOND] LONGEST SUICIDE NOTE IN HISTORY

Ah, Liverpool, that once-proud entrepôt of empire and empire's end, now reduced to hosting the Labour Party's annual wake. The 2025 conference unfolded there like a damp firework in the Mersey fog—sputtering, self-important, and utterly convinced of its own luminescence. One could almost hear the ghosts of Beatles past whispering, "Let it be," as delegates in ill-fitting suits shuffled through the ACC Liverpool, clutching clipboards like rosaries against the gathering storm. It was, in the grand tradition of left-wing jamborees, a spectacle of earnest delusion: speeches on unity delivered to a hall divided over Palestine motions, fiscal rectitude preached by a chancellor who once mistook prudence for a punchline, and a prime minister's oration that aspired to the heights of a motivational poster in a dentist's waiting room.

If Michael Foot's 1983 manifesto was the longest suicide note in history—a florid, 130-page testament to ideological self-immolation—then this gathering was its spectral sequel: the longest apology note, penned in invisible ink, pleading for forgiveness from a nation that had already stopped listening. At the heart of it all stood Keir Starmer, our accidental helmsman, delivering his keynote with the fervour of a man who has just discovered the word "growth" in a thesaurus. "Let's build a new Britain," he intoned, his voice rising like a kettle on a faulty element—promising raised living standards, an "antidote to division," and a combative stare into the "volatile world" beyond.

It was a phrase borrowed, one suspects, from the scrapheap of his 2024 conference rhetoric, dusted off and repolished for this year's model, much as one might recycle a Christmas jumper that's one pilling too far gone. Build a new Britain? One might as well urge the working classes of Barnsley or Blackpool to trade their flat caps for fezs and start a conga line to the mosque. These are the very folk—the plumbers, the posties, the punters at the Dog & Duck—who gaze upon Starmer's vision with the weary incomprehension of a man asked to assemble IKEA furniture without the Allen key. They don't want a new Britain, you see; they want the old one back. The one with borders that meant something, streets that didn't double as open-air asylums, and a welfare state that rewarded graft over grievance. And where does one go for such restoration? Why, to Nigel Farage and his merry band of Reform UK buccaneers, who, according to the latest YouGov oracle, are polling like a Brexit fever dream: 311 seats in a hypothetical Commons rout, leaving Labour to scrape by with a humiliating 144.

Farage, that eternal pint of bitter in human form, needs but a nudge from the opinion polls to supplant Starmer as next PM—a prospect as inevitable as rain in Liverpool, and twice as refreshing to the dispossessed. But let us not rush to the dénouement; first, savour the farce. Starmer's speech, for all its bluster about facing down threats, sidestepped the elephantine migrant caravans trampling the Calais sands and the homegrown howls of protest they provoke. Instead, it echoed the original cri de coeur from that X post by Clarissa Reilly—a sharp-eyed dispatch from the front lines of cultural attrition—blaming the Left's fetish for identity politics and open-door largesse for the very divisions Labour now decries as a right-wing plot.

Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, took the podium to declare that migrants must "earn" their keep, a sentiment as novel as suggesting fish should swim. Yet there she was, outlining a points-based system that might have passed for Tory-lite, were it not for the faint whiff of virtue-signalling that clings to all such Labour utterances like cheap aftershave. Division? It's not the bogeymen of the far right who have turned pub talk to pitchforks; it's the relentless prioritisation of the arriviste over the autochthon, the grievance-monger over the grafter. Reilly nailed it: the Left sows the wind of imported resentments and wonders why the harvest is a gale of Reform ballots. Enter, then, the supply-teacher simile, that delicious recent barb from the fever swamps of public discourse, where Starmer is cast not as the stern headmaster but as the hapless locum who's lost the class to chaos before the register is called.

Picture him: spectacles askew, tie askance, desperately intoning "Settle down, Britain—growth is the antidote!" while the backbench Bolsheviks lob Palestine pamphlets and the front-row Faragists doodle Union Jacks on their desks. It's a comparison that lands with the thud of truth; under Starmer's watch, the nation's primary-school electorate—those red-wall renegades who once trusted Labour with their lunch money—has descended into gleeful anarchy. Riots in the playground? Check. Bullying from the big kids (viz., the Home Office's migrant muddles)? Double check. And the supply teacher? He responds with a digital ID scheme, that gleaming bauble of bureaucratic overreach announced just days before the conference bells tolled.

Mandatory for every wage-slave from Land's End to John o' Groats, this phone-bound panopticon promises to "combat illegal working" while bestowing "countless benefits" upon the compliant. Benefits? One might as well promise jam tomorrow to a queue of sceptics today. Already, a petition swells past 2.7 million signatures, decrying it as the slippery slope to "mass surveillance and digital control"—a dystopia that would make Orwell chuckle into his gin. In a land where the average Joe views his smartphone as a portal to cat videos rather than Big Brother's confessional, this scheme will flop like a soufflé in a hurricane. The working class, ever allergic to the scent of the Stasi, will bin their digital doppelgängers faster than you can say "GDPR fine," leaving Starmer's brave new world as barren as a Soviet five-year plan. 

And so, amid the conference's closing choruses—Rachel Reeves unapologetically hugging her fiscal rules like a miser his hoard, Pat McFadden warbling on welfare as if it were Wagner—this gathering marked not merely a stumble, but the quietus of socialism's British branch. Communism, that grand old serpent in the garden of history, sloughed its skin here one last time: promising equality through the alchemy of audits and apps, only to deliver division via the ballot box. Labour's 2025 communiqué, like Foot's folly before it, exposes the rot at the core—an ideology that mistakes the mechanics of state for the mysteries of the human heart. It preaches collectivism to a people who prize their pint, their plot, their privacy above all; it exalts the global village while the villagers bolt their doors.

Why, then, does the traditional Western world— that sturdy edifice of Magna Carta and market stalls, of Locke and lager—always reject such nostrums? Because, in the end, it knows the soul of freedom is not forged in committee rooms but in the quiet rebellions of the everyday: the farmer who farms his field, the docker who docks his wages, the voter who ticks the box for the devil he knows over the one who promises paradise via passport scans. Socialism withers not from external tempests but from the innate individualism it seeks to smother—the wry English scepticism that views every utopia as a roundabout way to the gulag. Farage grasps this; Starmer, bless his corduroy trousers, does not. And as the Mersey laps indifferently at Liverpool's shores, one senses the tide turning inexorably away from the red rosettes toward the purple peril. The new Britain? Perish the thought. Give us back the old one, with all its warts—and we'll take our chances with the warts-and-all wizard of Farage.