Journalists From England

"Yes, settlers. This is what they are, and it is contemptuous to see them as anything else. They do not want to be dissolved into the great pool of British life. In time it must be assumed that political leaders will emerge who will articulate this sense of separateness and that this in turn will lead to tensions which are much more serious than street rioting and ghetto violence, since they will be the result not of economic grievance, or of social deprivation—although these can be expected to play some part—but of straight communal rivalry: that most fateful canker in the body politic. I am paying the immigrants the courtesy of seeing them as they ought to be seen, not as they are now, weak, vulnerable and in need of protection, but as they will become—strong, purposeful and potentially disruptive. With the benefit of hindsight it is now clear that British emigrants should never have been financially encouraged to settle in Africa, that they should long ago have been encouraged financially to come home. To urge that this lesson by applied to the problem of coloured immigrants in this country is the opposite of racialism. It is a tribute to their future strength."

"And while there has been much discussion recently about the wrongs of holding the World Cup in a country where homosexuality is illegal, the fact that a man in Qatar can legally beat his wife has merited barely a shrug."

"Gender activism has become the permissible face of misogyny for a certain kind of allegedly progressive man. It gives them latitude to call women derogatory names and make spittle-flecked videos, insisting that anyone who has a problem with male-born people in women-only spaces is on the wrong side of history. The effect is men’s-rights activism, but the energy is very incel — shorthand for people who are "involuntarily celibate". Incels rage online about women who selfishly refuse to have sex with them; gender activists rage at women who won't just bloody well shut up about their concerns about safety and say what the men tell them to say."

"But it turns out many who march for a free Palestine believe, as Hamas believes, that Israel shouldn't exist at all. They see Israelis as "colonisers and settlers". But do you know why they had to settle there? Because they had nowhere to go after the Holocaust achieved what centuries of persecution had failed to do and wiped out most of Europe's Jews. Many, like my Polish family, couldn't go back to their home country because there were still — even after the fall of Nazism — Jew-hatred and pogroms there. So they went to Israel. This is the context: the Jews are there because they needed somewhere safe to live, and now their grandchildren are being killed for it."

"[T]he only way for a Labour Government to bring about economic growth was through socialism, since only socialism could bring about that upsurge of working-class enthusiasm to compensate for the loss of business confidence... But...such policies are outside the range of any Labour Government, however large its majority, for the most compelling reason of all: Labour Governments lack the authority to take the international risks inherent in such a policy, to set the country against the prevailing international trends; lack the authority, that is, to summon up from the deep the forces of nationalism and put them behind socialism. The history and composition of the Labour Party precludes such risks... Yet without a leader able to spark the flame of nationalism, socialism will not work in this country."

"[T]he State, which the Labour Party is seeking to exalt...has seldom meant less to ordinary people. Its natural authority and prestige have never been so low. Paradoxically, this is to a large extent the fault of the socialists themselves. They have persistently denigrated the national institutions, derided the concepts of rank and hierarchy on which the State depends, deplored the spirit of national pride from which it draws its strength. The Tory idea of the State, rooted in history and tradition, pomp and circumstance, at least had some popular appeal. But in the language of socialism the State spells bureaucracy and bureaucracy spells all those aspects of the past which the working class find least palatable—bowler-hat-and-rolled-umbrella values, rigid hierarchy, orders from on high that have to be obeyed, impersonal authority. A socialist State in practice if not in theory, turns out to be the very last kind of State likely to appeal to the British working class."

"Imagine what would have happened to the Labour Party in 1964 or 1966 if it had appealed to the country in these terms: "We appeal to you, the people of Britain, to give us your votes so that we may wind up the empire, reduce Britain to the status of a minor power, and devalue the national currency." It would have been political suicide. It might have helped the Labour candidate in Hampstead and in a handful of other constituencies where progressive intellectuals reside in large numbers. But throughout the rest of the country, particularly in working-class areas, it would have disastrously confirmed the deep-seated suspicion among all classes that in fact the Labour Party does not stand for Britain."

"Perhaps this is special pleading, an anticipatory apologia for what may have to be done in this country if the far left ever comes to power, using the Parliamentary system to encompass what will be, in effect, a coup d'état. In that event, the question will not be who are "the Fourth and Fifth men," since their number will, I trust, be too numerous to count. But in our case, their will be a transfer of allegiance, not to the world's bastion of oppression [the Soviet Union], but to the world's greatest buttress of freedom [the United States]. That will make all the difference."

"Nobody should suppose that the slightly ridiculous picture painted of the Wilson kitchen cabinet by Mr. Haines or his real Cabinet by Mr. Crossman, is the result of some particular flaw in the character of a specially contemptible Prime Minister. Wilson's character merely compounded a danger common to all Labour Governments, perhaps to all Governments in an increasing egalitarian age: that of containing too high a proportion of men and women near the seats of power who have no feel for the appearance of office, none of that effortless cohesion and mutual trust of a ruling class for long accustomed to rule, no sense of public dignity or decorum and, in some ways, no instinctive flair for excluding those likely to let the side down by telling all for money."

"Powellism is now part of the English intellectual and moral tradition; part of the nation's mythology. The man, too, is a legend in his lifetime. So in a sense his work is done. For whatever eventually happens to him his ideas have now entered the bloodstream of the British body politic, guaranteeing them a kind of immortality. Of no other living British statesman could the same be said."

"The liberal-progressive view, so beloved of the intellectual community, is that the most crucial battle in the world today is in the field of race, and that Britain, for reasons of morality and expediency, must throw in its lot with the coloured peoples, for all their imperfections. But one can only doubt whether any Government in fact will pay more than lip-service to this view. During its last period of office Labour was able to blur the issue in a way that gave some satisfaction to both the realists and the idealists, backing the liberal-progressive view in words but only very partially in actions. It did not sell arms to South Africa, but it carried on cynically enough with trade and defence co-operation."

"These brown British citizens are in danger. Kenya is still a largely savage country, led by a man who a few years ago was involved in atrocities of indescribable horror. There are certainly as many signs in Kenya today of the fate being prepared for the Asian minority as there were in Germany in the early 1930s of the fate being prepared for the Jews. Yet in this case the potential victims are British citizens, and instead of urging them to hurry home, which would seem to be the sensible course, the British government is ordering them to keep out. Why, then, so little sense of shame among the normally highly decent British people? The reason, of course is very simple. They do not see this the situation in this light at all. To them, the Asian Kenyans are no more British citizens than Ian Smith is a genuine British traitor. Just as they refuse to feel angry about Rhodesia's so called rebellion—which they regard as a legal fiction—so they refuse to feel guilty about the Kenyan Asians, who right of entry into Britain strikes them as flying in the face of common sense. ... They do not feel guilty, because they do not regard themselves as having any part in the mad world which supposes that the white Rhodesians really should hand over power to the black majority or that large-scale coloured immigration in Britain is a good idea. ... They no longer feel responsible for "lesser breeds without the law.""

"[[Keir Starmer|[Keir] Starmer]]'s message was that he knew the country had put Labour in chiefly to get the Tories out – but that he hoped that he might, through a spell of solid governance, secure the public's trust. It is an unusual kind of political logic – having won an election, he now hopes to win over the people – but it fits the times. Britons are exhausted, wary and sceptical. They have seen the big promises, charismatic performers and grand schemes – Brexit, levelling up – all come to nothing."

"All right, a military dictatorship is ugly and repressive. But if a minority British Socialist Government ever sought, by cunning, duplicity, corruption, terror and foreign arms, to turn this country into a Communist State, I hope and pray our armed forces would intervene to prevent such a calamity as efficiently as the armed forces did in Chile."

"And yet, 7 October 2023 is also a landmark event in Jewish history. It will be remembered as a byword for Jewish vulnerability, the more painful for coming in the very place where Jews were supposed at last to have shaken off the powerlessness that blighted them for two millennia."

"But it was a pogrom that came to Israel last weekend, multiple pogroms in fact, as lethal as any that cut down the Yiddish-speaking Jews of the early last century or, in repeating patterns, the centuries before."

"But Hamas can enjoy a wicked smile of satisfaction: it laid a deadly trap – and Benjamin Netanyahu led Israel right into it."

"Second only to peace in Northern Ireland, the most desirable political development which I should like to see in the New Year is the emergence of a healthy-looking British Communist party. This would mean that the significant Marxist minority in this country would have a vehicle of their own, instead of continuing to "back-seat" drive the Labour party. The absence of such a Communist party is really a luxury which Britain can no longer afford, since it allows us to suppose that the Marxist threat is much less serious than it really is. In France and Italy, for example, where the Communists are immeasurably powerful, nobody is in any doubt about the strength of the forces arrayed against the idea of a free society, or the need to fight them tooth and nail. The danger of a Communist takeover is overt, visible and never forgotten for long."

"[I]t is not the importance of the Cape route...that forces Britain to support a hateful white supremacist state. It is the fact of white supremacy which makes the relationship so peculiarly irresistible. Of course it would be much less embarrassing if white supremacy was exercised in a less morally obnoxious manner. But if it was not exercised at all, the relationship would lose much of its point. The harsh truth, which will become clearer and clearer as time passes, is that Britain, far from being neutral in the race struggle, let alone on the coloured side, is positively on South Africa's side, since in the crucial battle in the world today—which is not between North and South but between East and West—Britain has no alternative but to throw in its lot with the white peoples, in spite of their imperfections."

"The Republican party’s shift away from democratic norms is no longer confined to one man, even if he embodies it and accelerates it. It is embedded in the ethos of the party now. Reversing that trend is a daunting prospect because of another shift, one that has been apparent for a while but which is taking especially vivid form in these midterm elections. It is the polarisation of information, so that Americans now exist in two distinct spheres of knowledge, each one barely touching the other."

"[On his play Jews. In Their Own Words compiled from the testimonies of 12 people] The result is, I hope, a mix of stories and perspectives that will never have been heard before on the London stage. Among them is the first-hand testimony of an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jew, recalling the day he was violently beaten on an English street. Or the odyssey of Edwin Shuker, who fled to this country in 1971 as a refugee from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Or the former MP Luciana Berger giving the most complete account yet of the journey she made from young Labour idealist to the target of a daily onslaught of racist, misogynistic and mortally threatening abuse, before losing the job she "lived and breathed and loved". ... The 12 conversations yielded all kinds of surprises. I did not ask every interviewee the same questions, except one. I wanted each of them to tell me where their grandparents or great-grandparents came from. The answers – Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Holland, Russia, Iraq and more – confirmed how much British Jewry remains a community of immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. When I put that question to [[Margaret Hodge|[Margaret] Hodge]], it elicited a family story that forms what might be one of the most moving passages in the play. After you have heard it, you will understand why Hodge’s father advised her always to keep a packed suitcase by the front door – and you might shudder when you remember the way that formative experience of hers was mocked when she recalled it during an especially rancorous phase in Labour’s civil war."

"This poses its own danger for democracy. Because there can be no collective decision-making – which is what democracy amounts to – without a collective, agreed-upon basis of facts. If we can’t first agree that the house is on fire, we can’t begin to talk about putting out the flames."

"When I became an adult, I suddenly couldn't stop thinking of them. Moments I had barely noticed at the time, yet they made enough of an impact to leave a footprint in my memory, began to surface."

"When it comes to Diane Abbott, two important things need to be said first. One is that as the first black woman elected to parliament, she will always have an important place in the political history of this country. The other is that, according to one study, she receives more abuse, both racist and sexist, than any other woman in parliament, and by some distance. Yet both of those facts only make her letter all the more dispiriting, even baffling. How could someone with such direct experience of racism show such little understanding of how it works for people who are not the same as her?"

"How much of one's ancestral identity must one give up to live in the modern world?"

"Here's an alternative: maybe adults could be actual adults for a minute. Instead of teaching children non-existent safe ways to strangle themselves and others, they could teach them not to do it, just as we teach them not to play with matches. Despite being frequently mentioned alongside "light spanking" and similar, choking causes brain damage and kills. It’s not like pulling someone's hair; it's like playing Russian roulette. And, of course, it is overwhelmingly women who are being strangled: the same study that found 58 per cent of female students had been choked said only 26 per cent of male ones had."

"What is becoming clear is that apartheid is not at the heart of the racial issue. At the heart of it is the fact of Western superiority, resentment of which would remain even if revolution came to South Africa. This is what the liberal-progressive ideology so dangerously overlooks... The struggle for racial equality will be seen as a power struggle and because of this intimately bound up with all those revolutionary forces, both within these shores and outside them, aimed at weakening the West. The West in short can never hope to win the hearts of the Third World except by ceasing to be the West, since in reality it is its virtues, quite as much as its vices, that cause the hostility. It is in this sense that the liberal-progressive obsession with Britain's being on the right side of the race war is so unrealistic. It inculcates a Western inclination to self-abasement that plays into Soviet hands."

"The word pogrom was not meant to exist in Hebrew. In the new Israel, the very idea of Jews being murdered en masse, their children butchered before their eyes, was meant to have been banished to the realm of bitter memory."

"I supported the legalisation of homosexuality between consenting adults in '67 and still do so. I think that anything which would increase… I regard homosexuality as being a great misfortune. I see it as something the less frequent it is in any society, the better for that society. All I am saying is that at schools, and I do think one has to emphasise at schools, I think that it shouldn't be something which anybody should be allowed to encourage or promote, certainly not any schools which are funded by the local authorities and where people have to go to by law."

"This is where you wind up when you view this conflict in monochrome, as a clash of right v wrong. Because the late Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz was never wiser than when he described the Israel/Palestine conflict as something infinitely more tragic: a clash of right v right. Two peoples with deep wounds, howling with grief, fated to share the same small piece of land. So, this is not a football game. It has no need for spectators who root for one team against the other, goading their chosen side to go to ever further extremes. This is not a game, for one grimly obvious reason. There are no winners – only never-ending loss."

"Some have taken this episode as a cue to assert that no one knows more about racism than Jews, that no one has suffered more than we have. This is to play Abbott's game, to assert that there is a "hierarchy of racism", and that my pain trumps yours. But this is not a competition; and if it is, it's not one any of us would want to win. Instead, we should join hands with those who, like us, have endured racism and hatred for a long time. Jews, black Britons, Asian Britons, Muslims, Irish people, Travellers – we have one big, sad thing in common. Those who hate one of us tend to hate us all."

"Yes, some in Hamas say they want political negotiations, but past experience suggests if there's a chance of an agreement that entails any outcome other than the annihilation of Israel, then the maximalists of Hamas will veto it with violence. Israel has its own saboteurs, its own maximalists. Several of them are inside Netanyahu's ultra-right government, ministers sharing their macabre fantasies of a flattened Gaza on social media, the likes of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, men apparently determined to deepen the current violence by ensuring it spreads to the West Bank and inside Israel itself."

""Politicised", like its trendier, more modern version, "weaponised", is used by people as a means of discrediting an allegation or argument. When yet another school shooting happens in the US, Republicans dismiss anyone begging for more gun control by telling them they are "politicising a tragedy". Antisemitism, Jews were repeatedly told over the past five years, was being "weaponised" against the Labour party purely to destroy Britain's socialist future. And it is a flat-out certainty that this winter, when the effects of the coronavirus begin to bite again and people, shall we say, vent their displeasure at the government for not locking down cities sooner/failing to provide key workers with PPE/lying about the safety or otherwise of care homes, ministers will accuse them of "politicising" the virus. But just because it might be people who don't like [[Julian Assange|[Julian] Assange]], or guns, or the Labour party, or the Tory party who are making these points, it does not follow that the arguments are untrue. "Politicise" and "weaponise" does not mean an argument is invalid – it means someone else knows they can't argue against it. Disagreements are styled in such a black-and-white fashion these days: I am good, therefore anyone questioning me is bad. Are people really this absolutist, or are they just disingenuously pretending to be so in order to avoid awkward questions? Maybe both. But there does seem to be a general fear of ambiguity, or just a resistance to acknowledge grey areas."

"Palestinians cannot live as subjugated citizens, and what is happening in Gaza now is an overwhelming tragedy."

"[Concerning a 2011 reissue of J. A. Hobson's 1902 work, Imperialism: A Study.] The foreword was written by Jeremy Corbyn in 2011. Across eight pages, the then Labour backbencher lavishes praise on the book. ... The trouble is, Hobson was not just an accomplished analyst of international politics – for the Manchester Guardian, as it happens – but an egregious anti-Jewish racist. ... And yet across the eight pages Corbyn wrote, there is not so much as an acknowledgment of the racism within that text. On the contrary, the bit Corbyn praised as "correct and prescient" was, in his words, "Hobson’s railing against the commercial interests that fuel the role of the popular press," which appears squarely in the section where Hobson’s target is "this little group of financial kings", these "cosmopolitan" men who he had already identified as Jews. (The chapter, incidentally, is called "Economic Parasites of Imperialism," with "parasites" an image recurrent in anti-Jewish propaganda.) This is not a mere aside by Hobson that might accidentally be overlooked in a skim-read by a busy politician. There are pages and pages of it. No one is arguing that Corbyn was obliged to denounce the whole book. He could simply have nodded to the problem with a tiny caveat: something like, "Despite some passages that read uncomfortably to the modern ear ..." But there is nothing like that. ... A Labour spokesman has said that: "Jeremy completely rejects the antisemitic elements of [Hobson’s] analysis." But if that’s true, why did he not say so when he wrote about it?"

"[Referring to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's Working definition of antisemitism] [T]he only pro-Palestinian who needs to fear the IHRA is the one who wants to say Jews are disloyal to their own countries, that Jews are Nazis and that the very idea of Jews having a homeland of their own is "a racist endeavour". You can say all of those things more easily under Labour's new code – the age-old accusation of disloyalty, for example, is no longer classified as antisemitic – which is one reason why the vast bulk of the Jewish community opposes it. But the IHRA itself, properly applied, allows plenty of scope. You can, if you want, say everything the state of Israel has done since its birth has been racist. All it prohibits is branding as a racist endeavour "a state of Israel" – the principle that Jews, like every other people on Earth, should have a home and refuge of their own."

"The catharsis lasted all of three hours. From 10am on Thursday morning until lunchtime, British Jews were allowed to feel a small measure of relief: after nearly five years of being dismissed as liars and dissemblers, deceitfully engaged in an elaborate smear campaign, a neutral legal arbiter had ruled that those who had sounded the alarm about antisemitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party were, after all, telling the truth. Yet the pause for reflection that so many had hoped for expired before it had really begun. It was overtaken by word that Labour had suspended Corbyn for suggesting that the whole business had been "dramatically overstated". ..."

"Thanks to Corbyn, the Labour party is expanding, attracting many leftists who would previously have rejected it or been rejected by it. Among those are people with hostile views of Jews. Two of them have been kicked out, but only after they had first been readmitted and once their cases attracted unwelcome external scrutiny. The question for Labour now is whether any of this matters. To those at the top, maybe it doesn’t. But it feels like a painful loss to a small community that once looked to Labour as its natural home – and which is fast reaching the glum conclusion that Labour has become a cold house for Jews."

"[Referring to Jeremy Corbyn, M]any Jews do worry that his past instinct, when faced with potential allies whom he deemed sound on Palestine, was to overlook whatever nastiness they might have uttered about Jews, even when that extended to Holocaust denial or the blood libel – the medieval calumny that Jews baked bread using the blood of gentile children. (To be specific: Corbyn was a long-time backer of a pro-Palestinian group [Deir Yassin Remembered] founded by Paul Eisen, attending its 2013 event even after Eisen had outed himself as a Holocaust denier years earlier. Similarly, Corbyn praised Islamist leader Sheikh Raed Salah even though, as a British court confirmed, Salah had deployed the blood libel.)"

"We thought the United States would step back from the abyss. We believed, and the polls led us to feel sure, that Americans would not, in the end, hand the most powerful office on earth to an unstable bigot, sexual predator and compulsive liar."

"[After referring to his March 2016 column cited above.] But these warnings were cast aside, dismissed as politically motivated smears rather than cries of pain and concern from a community that, for generations, had seen Labour as its political home. The dismissal came from the very top: when that column of mine appeared, Corbyn was filmed declaring it to be "utterly disgusting subliminal nastiness"."

"Whether it was his refusal to see what was wrong in a mural depicting Jews as hooked-nosed bankers making money off the backs of the poor; his suggestion that Jews might be born in this country but would never quite grasp "English irony"; his praise for a book that blamed 19th-century imperialism on finance houses run by "a single and peculiar race"; his warm embrace of a man who had repeated the ancient lie that Jews consume the blood of gentile children – pick your example – it was Corbyn who made British Jews feel an anxiety they had not known for the best part of a century. It was he who acted as a magnet, drawing in assorted cranks and bigots to join a party whose great name they soiled by their very presence."

"Prewar Jews, like today's East End Muslims, also lived in unforgiving poverty. They too were herded into the cramped streets of East London as the first stop for new immigrants. They too were reviled as outsiders, branded as parasites on the indigenous society. And they too were feared as a potential fifth column, suspected adherents of a violent, supranational ideology. The "Jewish menace" was said to be first anarchism and then Bolshevism. Today's "Muslim peril" is jihadism. This is what grieved some of those mourners most. As they huddled together in fear, one spoke for all when she said: "This is so wrong. We should be on the same side.""

"Its origin is 27 March 1945; the 77th anniversary is a little over a week away. Early that morning, at 7.21am, a V2 rocket landed on Hughes Mansions, a block of flats on Vallance Road in the East End. It killed 134 people, more or less instantly. Among them were two sisters, Rivvi and Feige (pronounced fay-ghee). Feige Hocherman was 33 and she left behind two children, a son not yet 11 and a daughter aged eight and a quarter. The little girl was my mother, Sara. The war was in its final weeks and the bomb that fell that morning would be the very last V2 to land on London. It wasn't a targeted missile, though if it had been it could hardly have delighted its masters more. For of the 134 people killed by that Nazi rocket, 120 were Jews."

"I think a good deal more discretion on the part of homosexuals and a good deal more understanding that the majority of the country does worry about homosexuality and does fear that their children might become homosexuals, the old-fashioned traditional attitude to homosexuality is being undesirable. I think that the majority of homosexuals ought to understand this and oughtn't to push their luck."

"[[w:Tony Slattery|[Tony] Slattery]] pretty much vanished from public life in the late 90s, and while 20 years will change anyone, he looks at least a decade older than his 59 years, and close to unrecognisable from his Whose Line days. Where once he was energetic and prickly, occasionally accused of grating self-satisfaction and gratuitous cruelty (he once said Jeremy Beadle should be "clubbed to death"), the man I meet today is like a lost, anxious teddy bear. Heavy-set and visibly nervous, he is still hyper-eloquent, with that familiar melodious voice, but the syllables sometimes stumble on his tongue. It is noon and there is a faint smell of alcohol about him, although he promises he hasn’t drunk anything today. "I made a special effort for you," he says with a sweet smile. As we walk through the office, I notice that he is limping. "I’ve got to get my leg sorted," he says, rolling up his trousers. His leg is purpled with vivid rashes and lesions. "It's some kind of cirrhosis," he says, unconcernedly. Whatever Slattery took out of life when he tore through the 90s British entertainment scene, life has since reclaimed its debt tenfold."

"Ever since Hiroshima, the mushroom cloud had been a nightmarish possibility hanging over all our imaginations, and now, quite suddenly, it was threatening to materialise. Oddly enough, fear did not come into it, so there was no need to keep a stiff upper lip; no need to ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’. For if everybody was going to die, then nobody was going to die, since dying involves leaving loved ones behind and this time there were going to be no loved ones left behind. No need, therefore, for tears or sadness. It was more a question of intense excitement; of being in on not the creation but the destruction of the world; in on, that is, the drama to end all dramas. From the moment of announcing the exclusion zone, President Kennedy and his small team of advisers had gone into purdah in the White House, making no appearances and issuing no statements. This unprecedented hush lasted for several days during which there was nothing much to do except wait and pray and hope for the best. I think we all knew by then that if anybody was going to flinch from this eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, it would not be President Kennedy. How we knew that I do not know, but we did, and somehow or other the total public silence from the White House had succeeded in communicating determination more effectively than any number of official communiqués."

"I am the son of that terrified little girl and I always will be."

"I had a couple of reactions to hearing that my views about gender might be too controversial for Sting. The first was: "I reckon Sting, Mr Tantric Sex God himself, is pretty clear on what a woman is." The second was: "So Sting once played a concert for the daughter of the former Uzbek president Islam Karimov, who was accused of boiling his political opponents alive. But apparently he can't bear to be interviewed by me because of my 'controversial views'?" Incidentally, these controversial views are — and buckle up, folks, because they might shock you — that trans people deserve compassion as much as anyone else, and a man has a penis and a woman has a vagina. Sting, send me your mate's number because I deserve to be boiled alive!"

"On Monday I went to the Jewish Vigil for Israel opposite Downing Street. It was nice, but it was also strange, because everyone I could see there was clearly Jewish: the men wore kippahs and tallits, and everybody knew the words to Hatikvah, Israel's national anthem. Across town a pro-Palestinian rally was happening. I looked at the photos in the papers in the next day and was struck by what a mixed crowd it was. Young Muslims, older white people, everyone marching together in defence of — what? Pogroms? Meanwhile, the Jews just had themselves. Now we know."