Russell Brand’s evolution from left-wing comedian to podcast hero of the alt-right

Jack Rear
Sat, 16 September 2023

After achieving mainstream success, Brand’s politics came to the fore - Jonathan Brady

Once known for the comedy which he used to skewer the political establishment in the early-2010s, how has Russell Brand evolved into an anti-woke podcast hero of the alt-right with a subscriber base of 6.59m on YouTube?

Brand grew up in Essex with his mother after his parents separated when he was six months old. He was diagnosed with ADHD and developed bulimia at 14. At 16, after disagreements with his mother’s boyfriend, Brand left the family home and began taking drugs. In 1991, he was accepted into Italia Conti drama school on a scholarship from Essex County Council but was expelled due to drug use and poor attendance.

Brand made it onto the London and Edinburgh comedy scene in 2000, aged 25, and began a presenting career with a stint on MTV’s Dancefloor Chart where he toured clubs in London and Ibiza, projecting himself as a figure of anarchic mirth. He has always courted controversy and was fired after coming to work dressed as Osama Bin Laden.

In 2002, Brand began bringing counter-cultural views into the mainstream with a short-lived television series RE:Brand on the now-defunct UK Play, in which he aimed to challenge taboos by meeting a neo-Nazi, inviting a homeless man to live with him, and masturbating another man in a public toilet.

He returned to the Fringe in 2004 with a one-man show discussing his heroin addiction, which received critical acclaim. A nationwide tour of a show about his caddish reputation hastened his move from counter-cultural outsider to ubiquitous mainstreamer: in 2007 he performed for Elizabeth II at the Royal Variety Performance.

James Blunt, Russell Brand and English National Ballet principal dancer Agnes Oaks after the Royal Variety Performance, 2007 - Anna Gowthorpe

By then a Guardian columnist, he published his autobiography My Booky Wook, detailing his drug abuse, troubled relationship with his father, promiscuity and sex addiction.

As his star was on the rise in America, Sachsgate – when Brand and Jonathan Ross left a series of lewd messages for Andrew Sachs, about Brand’s relationship with his granddaughter – resulted in a BBC suspension and Brand stepping away from his presenting role to focus on film roles.

With mainstream success, Brand’s politics came to the fore. In a 2013 Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman, Brand described British democracy as ‘ineffectual’ and encouraged viewers not to vote.

Asked in another Newsnight interview whether 9/11 had been perpetrated by the US government, Brand replied: “we have to remain open-minded to [that] kind of possibility”.

He guest-edited an issue of the New Statesman where he railed against capitalism and supported environmental issues and he continued to make frequent appearances at political demonstrations, criticising austerity, the war on drugs, and UK independence from the EU. In another book, Revolution he expounded on these points.

In 2015 he was still aligned with the left: ahead of the general election, Brand interviewed Labour leader Ed Miliband on his YouTube show ‘The Trews’ (a portmanteau of ‘true news’) where he encouraged viewers to vote Labour or Green. Later Brand supported Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership bid, but when the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020, Brand pivoted to his current persona, sharing anti-vaccine talking points and pro-Russian conspiracies in relation to the war in Ukraine. Brand’s TikTok channel was a source of Covid-19 misinformation: in 2022 he was forced to retract a claim that the drug ivermectin was an effective treatment.

He currently has more than 13m subscribers to his accounts on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and the right-wing streaming site Rumble, with more than six million on YouTube, where he posts daily and has been sharing videos for more than a decade, filmed from his home in Henley, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. About 300,000 watch his Rumble show daily.

He was making political videos for YouTube regularly long before the current generation of influencers; what’s changed is the intensity and frequency of his output (making multiple videos a day), and the kind of guests he features (increasingly those from the hard-right).

His success at building such a strong online audience is partly that his persona has remained the same, using the same passionate-but-mocking delivery, and the same rhetoric about capitalism; the elites; the mainstream media. Increasingly, his content attracts and panders to an alt-right audience.

Conspiracy theories swirl around Russell Brand allegations


Comedian’s claim of ‘concerted agenda’ taken up by X owner Elon Musk and misogynist Andrew Tate

Jessica Murray

THE GUARDIAN 

Sun 17 Sep 2023 

After allegations of sexual assault and rape against the comedian Russell Brand were published, some were quick to take up conspiracy theories about why they had been published.

Brand set the wheels in motion when he published a video in which he rebutted the allegations the night before they were aired and claimed they were linked to an attack on his freedom of speech.

He said he was the victim of a “coordinated attack” from the mainstream media outlets who published the allegations – the Times, the Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches – and that there was a “serious and concerted agenda” to control his voice.

He compared his experience to the media critique of Joe Rogan, the US podcaster who has been accused of promoting falsehoods and misinformation about Covid vaccines.

“It’s been clear to me, or at least it feels to me, like there’s a serious and concerted agenda to control these kind of spaces, and these kind of voices, and I mean my voice along with your voice,” he said, signing off by telling his followers to “stay free”.

An investigation spanning a number of years, and published on Saturday by the Sunday Times, revealed that Brand had been accused of sexual assault, rape and predatory behaviour between 2006 and 2013 by four women. Brand denies all the accusations.

According to the paper’s report, one woman claimed she had a relationship with Brand when she was 16 and he was 31, and alleged that he would refer to her as “the child” and encourage her to lie to her parents.

Another woman alleges that Brand raped her against a wall in his Los Angeles home and that she visited a rape crisis centre the same day. She received therapy there for the next five months.

Hours after the allegations emerged on Saturday, Brand performed at a sold-out gig at the 2,000-capacity Troubadour Wembley Park theatre in north-west London where he received a standing ovation from fans. He apparently told the crowd there were certain things he could not talk about during the show.

While Brand was being dropped by his talent agency and a charity he was affiliated with, those who came to his aid included Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and owner of X (formerly Twitter), who responded to his video statement: “Of course. They don’t like competition.”

He also replied to another tweet defending Brand, saying: “No more canceling. Enough is enough.”

The self-proclaimed misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, who is awaiting trial in Romania on charges of rape and human trafficking, announced to his followers that he would hold an “emergency meeting” on Sunday evening to “tell everybody the truth about what’s happening to Russell Brand”. “I know things I shouldn’t know,” he said.

He had already tweeted Brand saying “Welcome to the club”, and shared a post saying that Brand was getting the “Andrew Tate treatment”.

The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson also posted on X suggesting the allegations were linked to Brand’s views on topics such as “drug companies … and the war in Ukraine”. The GB News host Beverley Turner said Brand was welcome on her show “any time” and that he was being attacked for creating “autonomous, knowing and original content” on his channels.

Brand’s sister-in-law, the television presenter Kirsty Gallacher, initially seemed to show support, sharing his video statement on her Instagram story with a red love heart, although she later deleted it.

Brand has amassed a large following on social media – 3.8 million accounts on Instagram, 2.2 million on TikTok and 6.6 million on YouTube – with his videos often featuring interviews with far-right influencers and promoting conspiracy theories on issues such as the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the climate crisis.

Videos he has posted in recent weeks include titles such as “What REALLY started the Hawaii fire?”, “State of fear! Covid propaganda exposed!” and “Zelensky’s MASSIVE Ukraine censorship EXPOSED.”

One of his videos was removed from YouTube last year for allegedly “spreading Covid misinformation”, prompting him to move to the video channel Rumble, where he livestreams almost daily.

Inside Russell Brand’s conspiracy-fuelled fan army – and why it will never let him be cancelled

Guy Kelly

THE CONSERVATIVE TELEGRAPH

Sun, 17 September 2023

The allegations span a period of seven years, during the height of Brand's fame - Suzanne Plunkett

As is the custom among his generation of celebrities, a few years ago, when Russell Brand was bored and financially peckish, he decided to write a children’s book. His is a fertile imagination, as anybody who has seen his stand-up (or political theories) knows, but were that to fail, the entire canon of literature was available for him to plunder – dinosaurs, pirates, wizards, animals. As it was, Brand elected to directly retell a very old tale: The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

“I think the Pied Piper is such an interesting figure,” Brand said at the time. “When you think about [it] it’s weird what he did, taking them children away, and it makes you ask questions. Why did he do it? Is that OK? Why did it happen?” The Piper who leads the young from Hamelin in revenge for being unappreciated by the masses is, Brand thought, “a trickster [...] there to bring about change.”

The eventual booky wook, Russell Brand’s Trickster Tales: The Pied Piper of Hamelin, published in 2014, carried illustrations by the then-children’s laureate Chris Riddell. On the cover, the titular figure is depicted as a tall, slender man with a nest of long, knotted dark hair. He wears ill-advisedly tight clothing, winklepickers and black nail polish. It does not take a close reading to work out who he may be based on. “More than anything else,” Brand said, “I’m the trickster.”

Since the publication and broadcast this weekend of an investigation by The Times, The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches, which accused Brand of a rape, sexual assaults and emotional abuse in a period spanning seven years and during the height of his fame, a lot of old interviews suddenly read differently. All of his work does, relit as it is in a new light.

A still from Brand’s most recent YouTube video - PA

But one look at the comments underneath Brand’s most recent deposit to his YouTube channel, “So, This Is Happening” – a two-minute pre-denial posted on the eve of the investigation being made public, in which he ‘absolutely refutes’ the allegations insisting his sexual encounters were always consensual – show the Pied Piper comparison scarcely goes far enough. He doesn’t have mere followers, nor old-fashioned fans; he has an army.

“We’re with you, Russell,” writes one, yielding 4,000 ‘likes’. “I’ve been wondering how long it would be until they tried to pull this card,” another reads, beside a crying emoji. “I’m with you all the way Russell. They did it to Assange. They tried it with Bernie Sanders. They did it to Corbyn. They’ll try it with anyone they find a threat,” laments a third.

All over social media you’ll find similar sentiments: that since Brand repositioned himself as a YouTuber and podcast host, gaining a vast international following for his daily Stay Free broadcasts – in which he speaks to “awakened beings” and “say[s] the unsayable” about everything from Covid vaccines to the Ukraine war – “they” have had his card marked.

Public backing

As well as his millions of fans across YouTube, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok, Brand has received immediate support from various other “free” thinkers who command legions in the murkier suburbs of the internet. Those posting supportive messages about the 48-year-old, who has been accused of rape and grooming a 16-year-old schoolgirl, include Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson, Tucker Carlson, Laurence Fox, and Michael Barrymore.

It’s quite a fantasy dinner party, and also at the table is Alex Jones, the American far-right radio host and conspiracy theorist who was last year ordered to pay nearly $1.5bn in damages to the families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, after long promoting the lie that the shooting was a government-staged hoax.

Andrew Tate, currently facing allegations of his own, has publicly backed Brand - Alexandru Dobre

“The matrix is coming after Russell Brand, anybody that challenges the globalists, anybody that challenges Big Pharma, anybody that’s popular, that comes out against the establishment… is going to be accused of assaulting women,” Jones said, in a new TikTok video seemingly filmed at an airport departure gate.

In a gift to anybody playing conspiracy theory bingo from home, he goes on to mention Jeffrey Epstein and the assassination of John F Kennedy within the same sentence, before revealing he knows Brand personally, and admires him.

“I’ve never seen women throw themselves at anybody like him [...] Nobody ever accused him of assault. Now, because he comes out against the New World Order, suddenly the allegations are happening to him.” Then, for clarity: “I stand with Russell Brand, he’s completely innocent.”
Suspicious manner

Brand’s support is by no means exclusively online. A rousing ovation at his Wembley Park Theatre show in London on Saturday night, not quite the O2 Arena he used to sell out in 2010, attests to that. Yet in an era when conspiracy theories drifted into the mainstream as traditional and social media melded, his always suspicious, always questioning manner found a natural audience on the internet.

A former publicist for Brand’s memoir, Henry Jeffreys, once told the Telegraph that he recalled Brand being obsessed with things “going on beneath the surface [that] you don’t really understand, you know – ‘Wake up, people!’” even in the late noughties.

A few years later, after Brand had written for the Guardian and New Statesman, battled Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, interviewed Ed Miliband and published Revolution, a book advocating a non-violent social revolution, his radical politics were clear, making him a hero to certain sections of the British left.

His YouTube show The Trews (a portmanteau of True News, and this was before Donald Trump’s “Fake News” became a common phrase), gave him a new, mainly online audience at a time when the likes of Joe Rogan were still building their brands.

This, of course, was a time when Donald Trump built a political career from a calculated lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace. Under the pretence of simply asking questions nobody dares ask, YouTubers and podcast hosts, as well as some politicians, were quickly able to draw huge (mostly young male) followings. Seeded by harmless “open-minded discussion”, conspiracy theories bloomed in that environment: if they’re lying to you about one thing, why not everything?

Brand has compared himself to several revolutionary figures in the past 

- CAPITAL PICTURES

Since the Covid pandemic and Ukraine war, Brand’s fanbase of credulous keyboard warriors has only swollen. The titles of his videos are always immaculately clickable, luring viewers in with a suggestion that, yet again, “they” have been distracting and manipulating you, and Brand is the valiant one with the truth. The Pied Piper, speaking to camera in a deep-cut t-shirt and beaded necklace, his hair Messianic and his backdrop a converted pub garage near his £4 million riverside home in Henley-on-Thames, toots his flute and along they come.

“So, Trump Just Said THIS About Vaccines And It Changes EVERYTHING”, is one recent video. “The FBI Have Been Harvesting Your DNA?!” exclaimed another. Earlier in the year, he asked “What REALLY Started The Hawaii Fires?” He often likes to attack Volodymyr Zelensky, seems extremely preoccupied with Hunter Biden, and briefly quit YouTube last year after having a post “censored” for allegedly “spreading Covid misinformation”.

He could never stay away for long, though. His follower count consists of four million on Instagram, 2.2 million on TikTok and 6.59 million on YouTube. It is a vast reach, and for all his anti-capitalist bellowing, online popularity pays.
Familiar tactics

In the past, Brand has compared himself to Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and even Jesus Christ. He sees himself as a revolutionary, but while the revolution has yet to come, judging by the support he’s been shown since Saturday, he could at least claim to lead a very successful cult.

“Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance,” he’s fond of saying. It’s true, and to watch his YouTube channel for 20 minutes is to see a tyrannical ego at work. And by positioning himself as the scourge of the mainstream media and frightened establishment, he has insulated himself against full cancellation.

It is a familiar tactic: bang the drum of being “silenced” enough, and they won’t be able to listen to anything other than you. The more “they” attack Brand, the more he can claim he’s being hushed, and the more powerful his “truth” becomes. It is a carousel of protection. Besides, it’s not easy to cancel anybody who broadcasts alone from a pub garage.

And so his army stands firm, for once incredulous, forever loyal. “We are all behind you Russell,” one message left on YouTube assured Brand this morning. Those children’s books, Russell Brand’s Trickster Tales, were supposed to be a series. In the end, he never got beyond the first. The Pied Piper was enough. Now, the trickster will keep playing the same tune until they’re bored of it. No sign so far. They’re all behind him, all right.

British victory in Falklands Malvinas War might spur Argentina to build nukes, CIA feared

Dr Steven Taylor
Sat, 16 September 2023 

The Union flag flying over the British War Cemetery on February 21, 2012 at San Carlos, Falkland Islands 30 years after the conflict began - Getty Images /Peter Hazell

The CIA feared that British victory in the 1982 Falklands conflict would encourage Argentina’s ruling military junta to step up its efforts to construct nuclear weapons, according to a newly uncovered report.

Intelligence analysts at the spy agency examining the issue of nuclear proliferation wrote in a secret report that “the Falkland Islands crisis is raising security issues for Buenos Aires that could influence Argentine attitudes towards the development of nuclear technology.”

The report, dated 24 April 1982, said: “A humiliation in the Falklands probably would encourage the conclusion that the possession of nuclear weapons – or merely the foreign belief that Argentina had such weapons – might have made the UK more accommodating. A major reverse for Argentina in the dispute could persuade it to proceed to build nuclear weapons.”

The report, which has emerged from US archives, also assessed that the political isolation of Argentina following its invasion of the Falklands could also play a part in the junta’s decision to press ahead with their nuclear programme.

Prior to the Falklands War, the US and Europe had provided most of Argentina’s conventional weapons, but the invasion immediately led to an embargo being placed on arms supplies to the country.

The embargo, the analysts wrote, had “underscored the risks of dependence on foreign [arms] supplies” and “almost certainly reinforced the belief among many Argentine officers that nuclear weapons are needed.”

Margaret Thatcher poses with the troops in the Falklands Islands following victory in 1982

However, the report’s authors argued that should Argentina win the war for the Falklands, the position of the moderates within the Argentine government would be strengthened to the point that they would be able to influence the country’s nuclear policy.

“A military or diplomatic victory in the Falklands could reduce the pressure on the government to develop nuclear weapons,” they said. “Advocates of caution would emphasise that success in the Falklands was enough.”

‘Dangerously close’

The CIA report also outlined the status of Argentina’s nuclear weapons programme, which was started in the 1970s after the military seized power, and warned that Buenos Aires was dangerously close to becoming a nuclear power.

“The nuclear program is sufficiently advanced that even a severe economic recession following defeat [in the Falklands] would have little impact on the ability of the Argentines to make a few nuclear weapons,” it said. “Argentina now has almost all nuclear fuel cycle facilities needed to produce fissionable material for a nuclear device,” they said, adding that “a decision now to proceed could result in a detonation as early as 1984.”

The CIA’s fears were shared by Margaret Thatcher, who was concerned that Argentina might be receiving help from the Soviet Union to produce a nuclear bomb.

Days after the Argentine invasion, her Private Secretary John Coles wrote to Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong requesting on her behalf an intelligence summary of possible co-operation between Moscow and Buenos Aires, including the sale of heavy water – essential for the production of an atomic bomb – to the Argentines.

On 14 April 1982, Coles wrote to Armstrong: “The Prime Minister would be grateful for an assessment of the significance of the contract between the Soviet Union and Argentina for the supply of nuclear enrichment services and heavy water.”

Despite the fears of Mrs Thatcher and the CIA, Argentina’s nuclear weapons programme was in the end abandoned when civilian rule returned to the country under President Raul Alfonsin in December 1983.

UPDATED

Tropical cyclone Lee makes landfall in Nova Scotia as thousands lose power

Victoria Bekiempis
Sat, 16 September 2023 

Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Post-tropical cyclone Lee made landfall in Nova Scotia, Canada, on Saturday afternoon hours after it battered New England and eastern Canada with powerful winds and rains.

The storm cut off electricity to tens of thousands and inundated coastal roads in Nova Scotia, and left at least one person dead, according to the Associated Press. The 51-year-old man died after a tree limb fell onto his vehicle as he was driving in Searsport, Maine. The tree felled live power lines and workers had to turn off electricity before the man could be taken from his vehicle. He died at a hospital.

Though Lee was downgraded from hurricane status early on Saturday morning, the storm still carried winds of about 70mph (112km/h), Weather.com reported.


Related: Biden approves state of emergency for Maine as Hurricane Lee approaches

Forecasters issued a tropical storm warning for areas stretching from the New Hampshire-Maine border into Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Large parts of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, among them Halifax, were under a tropical storm warning, Weather.com said.

President Joe Biden on Friday declared a state of emergency in Maine as Lee barrelled northward. Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, remarked on Friday: “I continue to strongly urge all Maine people, especially those Down East, to take the necessary precautions to stay safe as Hurricane Lee moves closer.”

The US’s National Hurricane Center (NHC) alerted residents of torrential downpours. “Heavy rainfall from Lee could produce localized urban and small stream flooding in eastern Maine into portions of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia from tonight into Saturday night,” the NHC said on Friday.

. Lee – which at one point had achieved the highest intensity classification given to hurricanes, category 5 – battered Bermuda, the Bahamas and the US Virgin Islands with tropical storm conditions before moving northward, according to the Associated Press.

The NHC warned that Lee was poised to cause “life-threatening surf and rip current conditions” – with waves of up to 15ft in some areas of coastal Maine. The conditions threaten erosion in Maine, which is the US’s most densely forested state, as the AP noted.

Pam Lovelace, a Halifax, Nova Scotia, councilor reported that coastal roads were flooded and boats were submerged along St Margarets Bay’s harbor. The powerful waters come in the wake of extreme flooding this summer.

“People are exhausted,” Lovelace reportedly said. “It’s so much in such a small time period.

“From a mental health perspective, we’re asking people to check in on their neighbors.”

Canadian authorities urged people to remain at home rather than venture outside. “Nothing good can come from checking out the big waves and how strong the wind truly is,” said Kyle Leavitt, the director of the New Brunswick Emergency Measures Organization, according to the AP.

The National Weather Service meteorologist Todd Foisy described the ground in Maine as saturated, further imperiling trees that had been weakened by summertime rains. “We have a long way to go, and we’re already seeing downed trees and power outages,” Foisy told the Associated Press.

Officials in Canada have predicted that Lee will not be as damaging as the tail end of Hurricane Fiona last year. Fiona’s waters washed homes into the Atlantic Ocean and cut off power to most of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

The AP said disastrous hurricanes are somewhat of an anomaly this far north. In 1938, the Great New England Hurricane packed winds as high as 186mph – with sustained gusts of 121mph – at the Blue Hill Observatory in Massachusetts.

However, meteorological authorities have described the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season as unprecedented. This summer’s uniquely warm sea surface temperatures – caused by the climate crisis – are fertile grounds for tropical storms and hurricanes.

Some locals on Saturday seemed undisturbed by the storms. Among them was Bruce Young, a lobsterman in Bar Harbor, Maine.

“There’s going to be huge white rollers coming in on top of 50 to 60mph winds. It’ll be quite entertaining,” Young said. To be safe, he did move his boat to the regional airport, the AP reported.

In Dennis, Massachusetts, which is on Cape Cod, David Sundstrom, a local resident, said he had expected more dire conditions.

“Little disappointing, I thought it’d be worse,” Sundstrom was quoted by NBC Boston as saying. “But I’m glad this is all we’ve gotten.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting. This is a developing news story and will be updated.   

  

‘Lessons have been forgotten’: is the UK ready for a new Covid variant?

Charlotte Lytton
Sat, 16 September 2023 

Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

“New variant”, “care home outbreak”, “cases rising”: you’d be forgiven if the headlines around Pirola, or BA.2.86, the latest Covid strain to arrive in the UK, had triggered a severe case of pandemic deja vu. More than two years since the UK’s last lockdown, concerns over BA.2.86 – known to have infected dozens of people in the UK as of last weekend, including 28 at a Norfolk care home – have been rising. The worry is over what is “the most striking Sars-CoV-2 strain the world has witnessed since the emergence of Omicron”, according to Francois Balloux, professor of computational systems biology and director of the University College London Genetics Institute.

That Omicron outbreak resulted in almost half of all Britons getting infected with Covid last year, and we may be facing a repeat performance at what scientists say is the worst possible time. With temperatures falling (colder climes help the virus to thrive), schools and universities returning to large-scale indoor mixing – and at the outset of flu season – the overall rise in infections is already “translating to hospitalisations and deaths, increased NHS pressure, as well as more than a million suffering from long-term health problems under the umbrella term long Covid”, says Stephen Griffin, professor of cancer virology at the University of Leeds and a member of Independent Sage. “The NHS is buckling from continued underfunding and staff shortages.”

Pirola began raising red flags when first detected in Israel in July, with cases confirmed now in more than a dozen countries, including Denmark and the US. While the EG.5.1 (Eris) and XBB variants account for most Covid infections globally (and most of the more than 1m symptomatic Covid cases currently in Britain), Pirola, which descended from Omicron, is heavily mutated. This follows a pattern seen with Sars-CoV-2 since the beginning of the pandemic, explains Andrew Pekosz, professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins University. “They accumulate a few mutations that allow them to evade some of the antibodies induced by prior infection or vaccination, they spread for a few months, then they are supplanted by a variant that has picked up a few different mutations that also function to evade pre-existing immunity, and the cycle continues.”

With more than 30 mutations, Pirola is “very unique”, adds Pekosz, with the potential to be “more concerning” than the other circulating variants.

Lessons learned during the early part of the pandemic, and before, do seem to have been forgotten

The government started its Covid vaccine rollout last week for over-65s and immunocompromised people, earlier than planned, as a “precautionary measure” in response to the World Health Organization declaring Pirola a “variant of interest”. Still, concerns remain about the efficacy of the jab for Pirola, with studies so far producing mixed results. Both Pfizer and Moderna last week said their jabs offered “strong responses” to the spike protein (which they target). However Griffin says “multiple preprint studies posted by reputable labs show this [Pirola] to be equally, or perhaps more, antibody evasive compared to the XBBs” – which “are among the most antibody-evasive strains ever encountered”.

The consensus is that it is too early to tell how useful the vaccine may prove, though some MPs are pushing for 50- to 64-year-olds to be immunised, either as part of the rollout or privately. With Covid becoming “more of a value-for-money exercise” for the government, according to Duncan Robertson, senior lecturer in management sciences at Loughborough Business School, they may be playing a risky game by reducing eligibility for “financial savings”.

Planning is all the more challenging given that the UK’s surveillance and testing regimen is now the thinnest since the pandemic began. This is “frustrating” says Robertson, as “the UK’s ability to detect new variants has been compromised by the effective ending of the Office for National Statistics Coronavirus Infection Survey. Not only did that give a very good indication of the level of Covid in the population, it also allowed the proportions of variants … to be estimated, which could have meant that the emergence of BA.2.86 could have been better tracked.”

The UK Health Security Agency has promised that Covid testing will be increased, “although details at the moment are scant”, says Griffin. He says that “lessons learned during the early part of the pandemic, and before, do seem to have been forgotten.”

Susan Michie, professor of health psychology at UCL and another Independent Sage member, agrees that as we find ourselves in a position where “we really can’t see what’s happening” because of the lack of testing, missteps of the past appear not to have been absorbed. “One of the things we’ve really learned from the mismanagement of previous pandemics, certainly in this country, is waiting too late to do something about it. Given the exponential growth of pandemics, it does mean that once you’ve waited until it’s an obvious problem, you’ve really got a problem.”

The NHS in August hit a record 7.6 million people on waiting lists, and has in recent months been beset by strike action leading to the cancellation of 839,327 hospital appointments. It “is really on its knees”, says Michie. “We just can’t afford to have any huge big influx into the NHS.”

The new Pirola variant has 30 mutations. Photograph: Cristian Storto/Alamy

This is more likely given what Griffin calls the current “vaccine-only strategy”, which appears not to address measures such as masks or social distancing, and “fails to recognise and account for airborne Sars-CoV-2 transmission, including in healthcare settings”. He adds: “Vaccine strategy appears to completely disregard long-term consequences of Covid, which is both undermining of those affected as well as a false economy.”

With most excluded from the vaccine programme, should we be returning to masking, and social distancing? Michie is firm that “we need to take a population-wide approach to reducing the level of infection”, with everyone playing their part, rather than the current attitude that vulnerable people should stay at home. “This is discriminatory, but also, it’s not effective,” she says; either pushing elderly people into greater loneliness and social segregation, which studies have shown can accelerate decline, or overlooking the estimated 1.8 million multigenerational households in Britain. Such households are more likely to be made up of poorer people or those from ethnic minorities, who suffered a “disproportionate impact” during the lockdown years, according to the King’s Fund. Telling already vulnerable communities to stay at home is only “increasing inequalities”, says Michie.

Watching how Pirola continues to spread is now critical. “We are at the start of a wave; how serious it’s going to be, we don’t know,” Michie says. She adds that it is also unclear whether Covid is becoming seasonal. “But we do know that there are other seasonal viruses like flu and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), which do always ramp up over the winter months. We’re in a potentially dangerous situation.”

Others remain more hopeful.“We don’t really see it [Pirola] spreading fast so perhaps it isn’t as concerning a variant as it looks on paper,” says Pekosz.

Management is everything this time around, Robertson thinks, with the future of any potential outbreak now a matter for ministers. “To govern is to make choices. Let’s hope the government makes wise ones.”

Opinion

Elon Musk likes to think he saved us from Armageddon. He’s just brought it closer




Timothy Snyder
Sun, 17 September 2023 

The Silicon Valley oligarch, perhaps the richest man in the world, extends a hand to his fellow oligarch, the man who has his finger on Russia’s nuclear button. They share a secret about the foolishness of the masses, and take action to save us all from ourselves. Thanks to the two of them, the world is saved from Armageddon.

Not the precis of a favourably reviewed work of dystopian fiction but a scenario presented as though it happened, in a biography of Elon Musk and its press campaign. Although neither Musk nor his biographer can get the story straight, it is true that the multibillionaire CEO of X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) refused to extend the coverage of his Starlink satellite communications for the Ukrainian armed forces last autumn.

Musk did so because Russians (sometimes he says Putin) told him that a Ukrainian attack on part of Ukraine’s own territory (the Crimean peninsula, occupied by Russia) would lead to a Russian nuclear response. This was a lie. Ukraine has carried out dozens of operations in Crimea, some of them quite spectacular. It seems absurd to have to write this sentence, but none of them led to nuclear war. The net effect of such operations was de-escalatory, as such attacks reduce Russia’s capability to attack Ukrainian territory.

Russia’s ceaseless nuclear threats are a psychological operation to frighten Ukraine and its allies into surrender

Since we all know this from abundant experience, no one should have gone to press with the claim that Musk prevented nuclear war by stopping a Ukrainian attack on a Russian ship docked in Ukrainian territory. As if to punctuate the point, Ukraine has attacked several Russian ships in the past few days. Russia has retaliated by promising to repair them. The Russians know that they are in a war and that the other side is allowed to fight back.

After 19 months of war, most observers have understood that Russia’s ceaseless nuclear threats are a psychological operation, an attempt to frighten Ukraine and its allies into surrender. The claim that Musk prevented escalation repackages Russian propaganda, and helps it to find a new audience. It provides a platform to Russian lies meant to demoralise.

In fact, Musk’s actions have increased the chances of nuclear war. There is always some risk, which Russia increased by initiating a major conflict. Ukraine then decreased the probability by ignoring Russian nuclear blackmail. If Ukraine had surrendered, then the lesson for the rest of the world would have been clear: you must have nuclear weapons, either to blackmail or to avoid being blackmailed. The Ukrainians took this decision under stress, since if a weapon were detonated it would be on their territory. Musk, who was in no danger of any kind, chose instead to give in to the nuclear blackmail, thereby encouraging more of it.

If anything, Musk’s actions also extended the conventional war. After three major battlefield victories last year, the Ukrainians had a chance to put an end to the Russian occupation by striking south. One problem, to be fair to Musk, was that their western allies had not supplied them with the necessary weapons in time. But without comms, a meaningful advance was impossible. This gave the Russian side time to build the fortifications and lay the mines that make this year’s Ukrainian counteroffensive so much harder. Last week I visited a rehabilitation centre in Kyiv, and spoke to soldiers who had lost limbs.In almost every case, they had been wounded by mines. All of them had comrades killed by mines.

Musk has doubled down, spreading the very Russian propaganda that made him a dupe

Everything Musk thought he was making better, he made worse. Since then, Musk has doubled down, spreading the very Russian propaganda that made him a dupe, and moving closer to a common fascist position with Putin. In a race to the bottom, both men in recent days have been blaming antisemitism on the Jews. It is not going well for Russia on the battlefield, but Musk’s handlers can certainly say that they have done their part.

Perhaps the saddest part of this affair is the celebration of a coward at the expense of people showing physical courage. Ukrainians have absorbed and reversed a full-scale invasion by the world’s largest country at tremendous cost; Musk is a guy who makes a show of not fighting Mark Zuckerberg. In presenting Musk’s psychological vulnerability as wartime glory, the biography invites us into a world where our baseless fears are the truth, and the real courage of others the distraction. The Russians played Musk the same way that social media plays the rest of us, seeking out a personal anxiety, getting us to act on it, then profiting from the cognitive dissonance.

The oligarchs will be cowards, oriented to fantasies of escape to New Zealand or Mars or immortality or whatever, disinvested from the hard choices the rest of us have to make amid the crises they are making worse. Among other awful things, Putin’s war in Ukraine was oligarchical whimsy, based on the fantasy that Ukraine does not exist and its people wish to be Russian. There are things so stupid that you must be a multibillionaire to believe them; but when it all goes wrong, another multibillionaire will offer even more stupid succour, as Musk has done for Putin.

It is hard to think of a more dangerous idea than the one that people like Musk and Putin are heroes saving the rest of us from our own limitations. The plotline about the oligarchical supermen is indeed fictional, but it does real harm in the real world.

• Timothy Snyder is the Richard C Levin Professor of History at Yale University

Opinion

For Elon Musk, the personal is political – but his march to the right affects us all


Lloyd Green
Sun, 17 September 2023 

Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images

The personal is political. The phrase was popularized by 1960s second-wave feminism but it sums up Elon Musk’s ideological journey. Once a “fundraiser and fanboy for Barack Obama”, to quote his biographer, Walter Isaacson, the sometime world’s richest man now plays thin-skinned, anti-woke warrior – a self-professed free-speech purist who in fact is anything but.

Related: Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson review – arrested development

His rebranding of Twitter to X having proved a disaster, he flirts with antisemites for fun and lost profits. He threatens the Anti-Defamation League with a multibillion-dollar lawsuit. The ADL never suggested the name “X”. That was a long-term fetish, now a clear own-goal.

Like the building of Rome, Musk’s march to the right did not take only one day. A series of events lie behind it. Musk is a modern Wizard of Oz. Like the man behind the curtain, he is needy. According to Isaacson, outright rejection – and gender transition – by one of Musk’s children played an outsized role in his change. So did Covid restrictions and a slap from the Biden White House.

In March 2020, as Covid descended, Musk became enraged when China and California mandated lockdowns that threatened Tesla, his electric car company, and thus his balance sheet.

“My frank opinion remains that the harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself,” he wrote in an intra-company email.

But Musk jumped the gun. Moloch would take his cut. In the US, Covid has killed 1.14 million. American life expectancy is among the lowest in the industrialized west. Thailand does better than Florida, New York and Iowa. For their part, Ohio, South Carolina and Missouri, all Republican-run, trail Thailand. Bangladesh outperforms Mississippi. Overall, the US is behind Colombia and Croatia. Under Covid, Trump-voting counties became killing fields.

But in May 2020, amid a controversy with local government in California, Musk tweeted, “take the red pill”. It was a reference to The Matrix, in which Neo, the character played by Keanu Reeves, elects to take the “red pill” and thereby confront reality, instead of downing the “blue pill” to wake happily in bed. Ivanka Trump, of all people, was quick to second Musk: “Taken!”

Musk’s confrontation with California would not be the last time he was stymied or dissed by those in elected office. In summer 2021, the Biden administration stupidly declined to invite him to a White House summit on electric vehicles – because Tesla was not unionized.

“We, of course, welcome the efforts of all automakers who recognize the potential of an electric vehicle future and support efforts that will help reach the president’s goal. And certainly, Tesla is one of those companies,” Biden’s press secretary said, adding: “Today, it’s the three largest employers of the United Auto Workers and the UAW president who will stand with President Biden.” Two years later, the UAW has gone on strike. At midnight on Thursday, 13,000 workers left the assembly lines at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

For all of his talk of freedom, Musk sidles up to China. This week, he claimed the relationship between Taiwan and China was analogous to that between Hawaii and the US. Taiwan is “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China”, Musk said. Such comments dovetail with Chinese talking points. He made no reference to US interests. He is a free agent. It’s not just about Russia and Ukraine.

Musk’s tumultuous personal life has also pressed on the scales. In December 2021, he began to rail against the “woke mind virus”. If the malady were left unchecked, he said, “civilization will never become interplanetary”. Musk apparently loves humanity. People, however, are a different story.

According to Isaacson, the outburst was triggered in part by rejection and gender transition. In 2022, one of his children changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson, telling a court: “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” She also embraced radical economics.

“I’ve made many overtures,” Musk tells Isaacson. “But she doesn’t want to spend time with me.” His hurt is palpable.

James Birchall, Musk’s office manager, says: “He feels he lost a son who changed first and last names and won’t speak to him anymore because of this woke mind virus.”

Contradictions litter Musk’s worldview. Take the experiences of Bari Weiss, the professional contrarian and former New York Times writer. In late 2022, she was one of the conduits for the Twitter Files, fed to receptive reporters by Musk in an attempt to show Twitter’s bias against Trump and the US right. On 12 December, Weiss delivered her last reports. Four days later, she criticized Musk’s decision to suspend a group of journalists, for purportedly violating anti-doxxing policies.

Related: Benjamin Netanyahu expected to meet Elon Musk to discuss antisemitism on X

“He was doing the very things that he claimed to disdain about the previous overlords at Twitter,” Weiss charged. She also pressed Musk over China, to his dismay. He grudgingly acknowledged, she told Isaacson, that because of Tesla’s investments, “Twitter would indeed have to be careful about the words it used regarding China.

“China’s repression of the Uyghurs, he said, has two sides.”

“Weiss was disturbed,” Isaacson writes.

Musk is disdainful of Donald Trump, whom he sees as a conman. This May, on X, Musk hosted a campaign roll-out for another would-be strongman: Ron DeSantis. A glitch-filled disaster, it portended what followed. The Florida governor continues to slide in the polls, Vivek Ramaswamy nipping at his heels.

Musk remains a force. On Monday, he is slated to meet Benjamin Netanyahu, the indicted rightwing prime minister of Israel who will be in New York for the United Nations general assembly. Like Musk, Netanyahu is not a favorite of the Biden White House. Misery loves company.

ANTI-WOKE CONSERVATIVE FANGIRL 
Richard Dawkins interview: ‘I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words’

Judith Woods
Sun, 17 September 2023 

'Is trans ideology becoming a religion? Well, it has some of the attributes,' says Dawkins - John Lawrence

Who would be a man of sober facts in an age of strident feelings? A scientist dedicated to empirical proof at a time when “lived experience” now seems to trump objective evidence?

Richard Dawkins is just such a man. Bestselling author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, he is both our foremost eminence gris in the field of evolutionary biology and our most famously vocal atheist.

He was brought up in Anglicanism but by his early teens had rejected its central tenets on the grounds of logic, truth and the laws of physics. But he is mellower than his youthful rebellion would suggest. “I sort of suspect that many who profess Anglicanism probably don’t believe any of it at all in any case but vaguely enjoy, as I do,” he admits. “I suppose I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green.”

At the age of 82, and about to fly to the US for a conference, he is also working on a new book (he has already written or edited more than 20) and could be forgiven for embracing a quiet, intellectual life in the sequestered groves of academe, far from the noisy passive-aggression of the gender wars. After all, research published by the Policy Institute at King’s College London earlier this year revealed just 32 per cent of British people consider themselves to be religious. Surely his job is done?

But Dawkins is not the retiring sort, in any sense. Quite the opposite; he is in combative mood having not only witnessed but experienced first-hand the thuggish tactics of the “paranoid, hypersensitive” transgender movement that flies in the face of science by insisting that sex is merely assigned at birth, that men can become women and demonises anyone who disagrees. “Is trans ideology becoming a religion? Well, it has some of the attributes,” muses the author of The God Delusion, which prompted uproar when it was published in 2006. “Of course, it’s not a religion in the sense of believing in the supernatural, but the zealous hunting down and punishing of heretics, that’s very like a religion. The Salem witch hunts do come to mind and there is something ruthless and unforgiving in the way people like Kathleen Stock are treated.”

Prof Stock is the leading academic who was threatened, harried and bullied out of her job for daring to voice the entirely mainstream view that trans women are not the same as biological women and therefore should not access female-only spaces or take part in women’s sports. Dawkins has spoken out on her behalf a number of times, but to be honest, she’s old news.

Protesters gathering against Professor Kathleen Stock at Sussex University - Brighton Pictures

In downtown Salem, there’s an insatiable appetite for fresh sinners to torch; at present it’s the singer Roisin Murphy, who was first vilified on social media and then abruptly axed from the BBC’s Music 6 line-up (although the corporation begs to differ) after she described puberty blocker drugs as “absolutely desolate” and called for “little mixed-up kids” to be protected from Big Pharma.

Shocked by the backlash, she later apologised, but to no avail. It’s the modern way; excoriation followed by excommunication. Dawkins hasn’t heard of her, but then he is driven by principles rather than personalities.

“The worst aspect of the whole phenomenon is that if someone disagrees with you, they won’t engage in debate, instead they will brand you hateful, cancel you and sometimes destroy your career, by putting you in the virtual equivalent of the village stocks and hurling horrible things at you,” he says. “I don’t like, understand or endorse taking offence for its own sake. It’s childish. If an idea is silly, then, of course, I’m going to say so.”

Fighting talk. Believe it or not, calling someone “silly” can be construed as an existential attack. In the surreal, overwrought world of 2023, keyboard warriors routinely try to censor the academic who turned science into literature (how pleased CP Snow would be) and ushered in a new publishing genre aimed at “educated lay people”. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t fancy themselves as one of those?

'I don’t like, understand or endorse taking offence for its own sake. It’s childish' - John Lawrence

They say you should never meet your heroes. I freely confess Dawkins has long been one of mine; back in 1976 two seismic events tilted my world on its axis. Thin Lizzy released The Boys Are Back in Town. And I read The Selfish Gene: “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” I was 10 years of age and it blew me away.

“What a precocious little girl you were!” he exclaims when I tell him. It sounds terribly rude. It isn’t meant to be. He is actually beaming with pleasure – the cognitive dissonance between the precise meaning of his words and their emotional interpretation neatly sums up what one might call The Dawkins Effect. It explains the mismatch between the man and the myth. Here he is, engaged and thoughtful company yet caricatured as a furious contrarian.

“I do find it quite frustrating to be portrayed as angry,” he says mildly. “I am just focused on clarity and on truth. I’m emphatic and perhaps that gets misconstrued as fury.”

Given his fearsome reputation, the polite, charismatic man who greets me at the door of his bright warehouse apartment on the fringes of Oxford, where he is an emeritus fellow of New College (having previously been the fabulously-monikered “professor for public understanding of science” at the university) is not at all what I expect. He is in his stockinged feet, dressed in a suit (although mercifully tieless), has the erect bearing of an army officer and is gracious to a fault – I can’t recall the last time any man opened a door for me.

I look around the charming open-plan sitting room furnished with books and quirky pieces of art. Some of his many awards are laid out on his baby grand piano. Curiously, they all appear to be made of clear glass. Maybe it’s a science thing; full transparency and all that.

“Do you live alone?” I ask with a deliberate hint of mischief as I know he has a partner, whom he fastidiously keeps below the radar. He shakes his head and although the gesture is small, it effectively conveys that his personal life is out of bounds.

When I quip that having no fewer than three ex-wives (one of whom includes Lalla Ward, an actress who played Romana in Doctor Who and was once married to Tom Baker) and a current girlfriend is surely the very essence of The Selfish Gene, I watch him narrow his eyes and steadfastly refuse to be in the least bit amused.

“Nobody has any interest in my private affairs,” he says crisply. I demur but as I don’t have any peer-reviewed evidence to offer him by way of backing up my assertion, I have no choice but to let it go. Eventually, he concedes he has a daughter, Juliet, who is a GP with a young son and expresses “great pleasure” in being a grandfather. What follows is less an interview and more of a free-wheeling conversation.

With pleasing perversity, we begin at the end and talk about death – he is an advocate of assisted dying: “I think if it were available, fewer people would die by suicide because they would have the reassurance that they would get help when they needed it.”

I agree it would be humane then murmur something facetious about not being sure if that would jeopardise my hopes of getting to Heaven. “I don’t think anyone seriously thinks their soul survives death,” he gently reproves before catching sight of my raised eyebrow and literally gasping in utter astonishment. “You don’t really believe in God do you? Is it because you are Irish?”

Ought I to feel offended? I could but I don’t give a monkey’s what anyone thinks about my beliefs and it’s really quite funny. He’s Richard Dawkins for pity’s sake, so what else is he going to say? I grin, give an elaborate agree-to-differ shrug and we turn to the way language is being weaponised and used as a tool of identity politics.

“It’s one thing to be polite, and I would certainly refer to a person with the pronoun of their preference,” he says counterintuitively. Are his enraged, spittle-flecked opponents hearing this? He doesn’t sound like any sort of hate-filled transphobe now. Then he goes and spoils it all. “But. It is quite another thing when activists absolutely insist that you change your language and your terms of reference. That is not acceptable.”

'I would certainly refer to a person with the pronoun of their preference' says Dawkins - John Lawrence

In February of this year, what he calls “crackpot” North American evolutionary biologists called for a ban on certain terms for not being “inclusive” enough. They suggested labels such as male, female, man, woman, mother and father should be replaced by “sperm-producing” or “egg-producing” to avoid “emphasising hetero-normative views”. “The only possible response is contemptuous ridicule,” retorts Dawkins. “I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words.” It seems crazy that such mania has taken hold. But Dawkins (aged 82, remember) remains reassuringly phlegmatic. “I’m pretty sure this will pass, just as McCarthyism did. It’ll pass because it flies in the face of scientific reality,” he says. “I speak as a biologist. There aren’t many absolutely clear distinctions in biology. Mostly what we have is a spectrum. But the male-female divide is exceptional in biology. It really is a true binary.”

I can hear the mob sharpening their pitchforks already. But Dawkins isn’t bothered. He actually revels in it and certainly isn’t beyond a bit of mischief; he brands Twitter a “cesspool” and “the equivalent of scribbling on a lavatory wall”, but he still has an account with three million followers. Sometimes, he films himself reading aloud the inane abuse he gets and posts it on YouTube.

There’s also the US-based Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, its stated mission being to promote scientific literacy and a secular worldview and sees its job as “nothing less than changing America’s future”. The home page drolly states: “Our Members Have Unselfish Genes.”

Born in 1941, Dawkins, who has a younger sister, spent his early childhood in Nairobi, Kenya, where his father was stationed during the Second World War working as an agricultural specialist with the colonial service. As a child, he was sent to board at Oundle School in Northamptonshire (founded in 1556), and when the family returned to England in 1949, Dawkins went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read zoology. He remained at Oxford, where he gained master’s and doctorate degrees in zoology, before becoming an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California in Berkeley. He returned to Oxford to lecture in zoology in 1970 and six years later published The Selfish Gene, to huge acclaim. For all his brilliant intellectual sparring, he’s at his best, his most charismatic when he speaks about science and the sense of wonder he still retains.

“The world is marvellous!” he cries. “Science is based on evidence and the grandeur of the universe, of geological time and astronomical space puts all our parochial, trivial concerns into perspective.” Well, that will definitely have triggered someone somewhere. How dare anyone put their parochial concerns into perspective?

Dawkins is putting the very final touches to his sumptuous new book, The Genetic Book of the Dead, due to be published next year, which explores the untapped potential of DNA to transform and transcend our understanding of evolution. “The main thesis is that the individual is shaped by the natural selection of its ancestors and if we only had the eyes to see it we would be able to observe how any animal is the palimpsest of the forbears.”

I squeal inwardly because he (correctly) assumes I know what palimpsest means. “The book is aimed at the same audience as The Selfish Gene,” he adds. Would that be educated lay people and precocious little girls, I inquire. He chuckles, then slides his copy across the table to me.

What is fascinating, old-fashioned and admirable, in a bloody-minded sort of way about Dawkins is this. He can – does – effortlessly mesmerise and convince with his scientific eloquence. But when he states something that could (absolutely will) be construed as hugely controversial by the hurt feelings brigade, he feels no obligation to qualify his statement.

Not even for the mealy-mouthed sake of self-preservation.

One example is when we turn to the incendiary yet increasingly fashionable concept of apologising and making personal reparations for slavery. It is documented that his ancestor Henry Dawkins had “owned” more than 1,000 enslaved people in Jamaica by the time of his death in 1744.

“You can’t say sorry to people who are dead,” says Dawkins bluntly. Robust statements like this are – certainly ought to be – the meat and bones of higher education and are intended to provoke discussion in the tutorial room. But such economy of speech jars in the real world. I have to encourage him to elaborate.

“Slavery was the most abominable thing, but there’s no logic in giving people money just because they happen to be the same colour as those who were enslaved. They aren’t the same people. Nor is there logic in me saying sorry for deplorable deeds that were done by people who happened to be the same colour as me. The whole idea is racist.”

It’s a strong take on the subject. And then (too late for the haters) he softens his stance: “But having said that, let’s talk about it and exchange views.”

Again, this is not how the world works. Ideally, we would indeed all be able to marshal facts and express cogent opinions, but the idea of nuance died out many years ago.

We move on. A peculiar form of Unnatural Selection has compelled Dawkins too to evolve. He used to be a leftie but feels politically homeless now that end of the spectrum has been infiltrated and brainwashed by the trans lobby; Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer can’t quite bring himself to say definitively that 100 per cent of women don’t have penises and Lib Dem Ed Davey is very clear that some of them do.

“I certainly won’t be voting Conservative. But beyond that, I’m not sure…” for the first time, Dawkins equivocates. It doesn’t suit him. “I rather think for the first time that I might not vote at all.” On this too, we mournfully agree and slip into silence. But not for long: he is indefatigable.

“Maybe we should recognise a distinction between sex and gender?” he asks, rhetorically. “Perhaps it’s really true that some people sincerely feel they have been born in the wrong body. Maybe they sincerely feel female even though they have a fully developed male body. Maybe they really are of female gender albeit of male sex,” he continues.

“But when such a person enters a women’s athletic event, say a swimming competition, it is not their female psychological gender that gives them the stature and the upper body strength to carry off the medals. It’s their male sex. And it’s their penis, not their psychological gender that upsets women when they strip off in a women’s changing room. Of course, you might say, ‘What’s so intimidating about a penis?’ But if you follow that line of argument, you might as well abolish separate changing rooms altogether.”

Except, as we have established, there is no framework for any sort of discussion, just shrill, shouty argy-bargy. He has a rather ingenious solution for that too: “I think children should be taught critical thinking from an early age: how to discuss and how to argue based on evidence, rather than everybody citing their own ‘lived experience’, which is of no relevance to the rest of the planet. Young people are inevitably swayed and carried along by ideology and I do have some sympathy for them, so let’s give them the tools to think for themselves.”

Given Britain’s crumbling school estate and dismal showing in international numeracy rates, the introduction of Socratic questioning – the fine art of disciplined and rational dialogue between two or more people – to the curriculum sounds like it might be a stretch.

But something needs to happen if we are to break the current cycle of outrage and cancellation that is at best coarsening and at worst entirely stymying public discourse.

Sadly, our time is up so I leave, clutching The Genetic Book of the Dead, my inner 10-year-old skipping with joy, my adult self grateful that eminent figures like Dawkins refuse to be silenced by the transgender vigilantes who would see the rights of the many subjugated to the sensibilities of the few.

Only taxing and spending can repair the damage of Brexit. Who will tell Labour?

William Keegan
Sun, 17 September 2023

Composite: Sinai Noor/Shutterstock

‘You made a mistake, Keegan. I don’t like mistakes. Just don’t do it again.” Those words were spoken by the then editor of the Financial Times, Sir Gordon Newton, early in my career and they have stayed with me. Newton had an air of great authority. I often sense his shadow leaning over me to this day.

Alas, the shadow was not in evidence a fortnight ago. I had been much struck by some remarks by the financier Guy Hands quoted in the New European, and I requoted them in this column. They included an excoriating attack on the band of financiers who had supported Brexit, in their own interests but certainly not of the country’s.

Unfortunately, I described Mr Hands as “a former Brexiter”. I had been told this in good faith by a normally reliable source (I had never met Mr Hands) and committed the cardinal error of not double-checking – a rare lapse, I like to think.

Anyway, his office got on to the paper and the error was corrected in the online edition. A brief correction was also printed on our letters page last week.

Nevertheless, I am well aware of the common complaint that often, when mistakes are made, the correction is less visible than the error. So I should like to take this opportunity to apologise publicly to Mr Hands for my mistake. Imagine! Accusing someone of being a Brexiter when he isn’t and never was! I hang my head in shame.

Apart from anything else, we live in an atmosphere where politicians play havoc with the truth. My acquaintance the late Lord Armstrong, when cabinet secretary, and in a spot, was quoted as saying that he had been “economical with the truth”. This was an echo of a line by Edmund Burke and struck quite a chord at the time.

These days, the practice of being economical with the truth, indeed of perpetrating outright lies – not quite the same thing – is commonplace. Indeed, interviewers on the radio occasionally have to point out to ministers that they are, shall we say, not quite telling the truth.

Which, almost inevitably, brings us back to the Brexit about which Mr Hands was rightly so scathing.

The disaster is now so manifest that even the timorous Labour party is beginning to take up the cudgels. I have spent a lot of time attacking the Tories for, first, calling that ignominious referendum in 2016, and then going ahead with inflicting on this country the most grievous act of economic and social harm in history. Talk about being economical with the truth: the leave campaign was a tissue of lies.

The latest example of the difference between the “Brexit freedom” myth and harsh reality comes from research by UK in a Changing Europe: since 2016, the institutions that were set up to replace our very productive relationship with the European Investment Bank (EIB) – which backed the construction of the Channel tunnel – have invested two-thirds less than we received from the EIB between 2009 and 2016. Hardly a boost to productivity…

Starmer now rarely misses an opportunity to rule out the idea of rejoining the EU in general or the single market in particular

But let us face it: if the Labour party had not been led by Jeremy Corbyn, there might have been some serious opposition to Brexit. As it was, the then Labour leader showed none of the wisdom of such predecessors as Harold Wilson, and, frankly, let the nation, and his party, down. Most people seem to assume that Corbyn was lukewarm in support of remain because he was himself a Brexiter.

Labour now has a leader in Sir Keir Starmer who was a passionate remainer and who for a time campaigned for another referendum, to revisit the scene of the crime.

He now rarely misses an opportunity to rule out the idea of rejoining the EU in general or the single market in particular – the rules of the latter having been influenced to a considerable extent by representatives of previous British governments. He tells us: “Just because we are outside the EU, it doesn’t stop us leading in Europe.” Oh yes?

Starmer is making some encouraging noises about greater cooperation with the EU, not least on the subject of asylum seekers. But whether such well-intended moves are going to be sufficient to repair the colossal economic damage resulting from our absence from the single market is highly questionable. The fact of the matter is that the damage of up to between 5% and 6% a year of our gross domestic product resulting from Brexit is going to limit any scope a new Labour government would have to repair the damage caused to public sector services by the austerity imposed by the Conservatives. The impact on tax revenues is about £50bn a year.

When I read that Tony Blair is calling upon Starmer to avoid any programme of tax and spend, I wonder what world our former prime minister is now living in.

The problems facing an incoming government are due to a considerable extent to the fact that there has not been enough taxing and spending in the past 13 years and, in order to repair the damage, there needs to be a lot more in the future.

Blair claims that he does not wish to be a backseat driver to a new Labour government. He has a funny way of showing this.