With lists and notebooks, I find that I am worryingly on the same page as Elon Musk
Watching Keir Starmer with President Trump in Washington last week was a bit like watching an indulgent grandparent deal with a miscreant child. When the prime minister produced his invitation from King Charles – 'This is unprecedented!' he said delightedly, of what will be Don's second state visit to the UK – I half expected him to follow up with a Lego model of the White House, or a special Trump Pez dispenser and a year's supply of cola-flavoured sweets for it.
Alas, I'm unable to be equally scornful of Elon Musk's edict to federal employees that they tell him in an email of five things they accomplished in the last week. Oh yes, it's silly. Who'll look through these, and how will they check the enclosed bullet points aren't the work of the office satirist? But as a compulsive list-maker myself, my outrage is on the muted side. Sheepishly, I shuffle my notebooks, their closely written pages so replete with determination, wild ambition and pathos, I come off like some tragic hybrid of Adrian Mole and Martha Stewart.
Oh, the striving. In terms of immediate action, I have three lists on the go at any one time: to do today; to do this week; to do at some point soon. But this is as nothing compared with my future achievement lists, of which I have dozens in play. These are floaty and nebulous, their headings along the lines of 'ideas', 'thoughts' or (how embarrassing) 'composers I should get into'. The most shaming of them is 'things I want' (a painting by Ivon Hitchens or, failing that, a little bit of Chanel).
As for year end lists, they take many guises, from praise (what did I do that anyone liked?) to all the new novels I read (old novels don't count). Protestant autodidact that I am, I simply cannot function without lists: several days ago, this column began as one – 'poss items for Notebook' – and when it's complete, it'll be crossed off yet another.
Living for three weeks without a boiler in a cold snap is an exercise in gratitude as well as stoicism. When the man from British Gas finally arrives to save us, I forgive him even when he accidentally smashes a favourite vase. I could kiss our fiercely hot radiators now, and may yet build some kind of household shrine in their honour.
During this period of refrigeration, my fingers and toes began to burn and itch, which confused me at first. Perhaps our Captain Oates jokes were about to stop being funny. ('I'm just going outside, I may be some time,' we would say, on leaving the only heated room.)
But then I remembered: I'd been here before as a teenager. Kids, it was colder then, and our parents were more stingy with the thermostat. I had chilblains, a paradoxical Dickensian ailment that only becomes the more agonising when your extremities begin to warm up.
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To the National Portrait Gallery for an exhibition celebrating The Face magazine, which makes me mournful. Many of the faces on the walls – fashion designer Alexander McQueen, singer Steve Strange – are dead now, and while a few young people are milling around, blithely taking photos of photos, mostly the crowd is grey-haired and wearing trainers chosen for comfort rather than hipness.
I used to work with the late stylist Isabella Blow, and it's always slightly guilt-inducing to stumble on her work. Back then, I was obsessed with her expenses, believing them to be bigger than my salary (I may not have been wrong). But here's a dazzling photograph (Taste of Arsenic) by Sean Ellis that she helped to conjure. It pushes all thoughts of taxi receipts clean from my mind.
Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
National guard deploys in downtown LA amid eerie calm after two days of unrest
On a foggy, unseasonably cold morning in Los Angeles, the national guardsmen suddenly pressed into service by Donald Trump to quell what he called a 'rebellion' against his government were nothing if not ready for their close-up. Outside a federal complex in downtown Los Angeles that includes a courthouse, a veterans' medical centre, and a jail, two dozen guardsmen in camouflage uniforms were arrayed in front of their military vehicles with semi-automatic weapons slung over their shoulders for the benefit of television and news photographers clustered on the sidewalk. They stood with the visors of their helmets up so the reporters could see their faces. Most wore shades, despite the gloomy weather, giving them the eerie appearance of extras from a Hollywood action movie more than shock troops for the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. After two days of unrest in response to heavy-handed raids by Trump's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in downtown Los Angeles and in the heavily Latino suburb of Paramount, the day started off in an atmosphere of uneasy, almost surreal calm. The skyscrapers and government offices of downtown Los Angeles were ringed by vehicles from multiple law enforcement agencies – Los Angeles police and parking enforcement, county sheriffs, highway patrol and private security guards. Most, though, were deployed for an entirely different event – a festival and two-mile walk organized by the non-profit group the March of Dimes to raise money for maternal and infant health. The streets around Grand Park, across from City Hall, were closed to traffic, but the police seemed less interested in sniffing out anti-Ice protesters than they were in posing for pictures next to a bubble machine with March of Dimes volunteers dressed as Darth Vader and other Star Wars characters. 'We had the LAPD's community engagement Hummer come by earlier and they told us we had nothing to worry about,' event organizer Tanya Adolph said. 'They said they'd pull us if there was any risk to our safety. Our numbers are down markedly, I won't hide that, but we've still managed to raise $300,000.' Local activists have called for demonstrations against the immigration crackdown; one demonstration set for Boyle Heights east of downtown and the other outside City Hall. Many activists, though, were worried about continuing Ice raids, particularly in working-class, predominantly Latino parts of the LA area like Paramount – and worried, too, that any national guard presence heightened the risk of violence. Governor Gavin Newsom's office reported on Sunday that about 300 of the promised 2,000 national guardsmen had deployed in the LA area. In addition to the small presence downtown, a group of them was reported to have driven through Paramount, scene of clashes between protesters and local police outside a Home Depot on Saturday. Trump congratulated the national guardsmen on a 'great job' after what he called 'two days of violence, clashes and unrest' but, as several California political leaders pointed out, the national guard had not yet deployed when city police and sheriff's deputies used tear gas and flash-bang grenades to clear the streets. Both Ice and local activists estimated that about 45 people were arrested on Friday and Saturday, and several were reported to have been injured in confrontations with the police. Nick Stern, a news photographer, said he was shot in the leg by a less-lethal police round and was in hospital awaiting surgery. David Huerta, a prominent union leader with the Service Employees International Union, was also treated in hospital before being transferred to the Metropolitan Detention Center, the federal lockup in downtown LA. One of many slogans spray-painted on the walls of the federal complex, within eyeshot of the national guardsman and the news crews, read: 'Free Huerta.' Others, daubed liberally on the walls of the complex around an entire city block, expressed rage against Ice and the Los Angeles police in equal measure. 'Fuck ICE. Kill all cops!' one graffiti message said. 'LAPD can suck it,' read another. Elsewhere in downtown Los Angeles, little seemed out of the ordinary. Homeless people slept undisturbed on a small patch of lawn on the south side of City Hall. Traffic moved unhindered past the county criminal court building and the main entrance to City Hall on Spring Street. Alejandro Ames, a Mexican American protester, who had traveled up from San Diego sat at a folding table on the west side of City Hall with a hand-scrawled sign that read: 'Republic against ICE and the police'. Ames said he was a Republican and hoped this would give extra credence to his plea for restraint by the federal authorities. 'I don't want 'em to go crazy,' he said. 'I want 'em to go home.'
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an hour ago
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Can we still be Britain without the British? We'd rather you didn't ask
I couldn't care less about the burka debate. Not a tinker's. Why? Because it's a concession of defeat, a belated response by panicked politicians to a change that's already happened and that they largely encouraged. Last week, a meteor hit Britain with the publication of a demographic study by the queerly named Centre of Heterodox Social Science. By 2063, say the sociable hets, white Britons will be a minority; come the new century, almost one in five citizens will be Muslim. This forces us to consider a very politically incorrect question: will Britain still be Britain if it's no longer majority white British? The official answer is 'absolutely, yes'. Elite liberals believe nations are defined by values, and thus anyone, from anywhere in the world, can become British if they conform to them. It helps that these values are universal. Fairness, tolerance, kindness... this is a portable identity that is uncontroversial, because it demands nothing except to pay one's taxes and avoid murder. Keir Starmer warns that we are becoming an 'island of strangers', while promoting a vision of citizenship that is entirely passive. It's also based on a misreading of human nature. Liberals assume that values shape culture, such that we could pass a law – ban the burka, ban Islamophobia – and we'd become good neighbours overnight. But it's the other way around. Culture shapes values, and culture is the product of non-abstract, substantial qualities, such as climate, geography, religion, language and ethnicity. We can shorthand it as 'history'. Thus: we are democratic in Britain not because a committee decided it over one wild weekend, but following nearly a thousand years of revolution and reaction, baked into memory and expressed as temperament. Such a society is light-touch and self-governing, at least in theory, because we've been marinating in its ethics and customs since birth. The English, Welsh, Scots etc do exist as cultures – not superior to others, nor unaffected by migration, but really real – and if they undergo a profound change in composition, this is bound to change the nature of Britishness, too. Isn't that obvious? It's regarded as axiomatic elsewhere. We rush to recognise and cultivate the historical identity of First Nations people, just as we step back nervously from a Holy Land conflict shaped by competing ethnic claims over biblical territory. And even if you regard ethnic conflict as sinful, as I do, or based upon a category error, as academics insist, we have to accept that identity matters to a lot of people. In which case, I struggle to think of a society in history that has faced the scale of change happening to us without descending into violence or authoritarianism. Today, the liberal understanding of nationhood is already in retreat. Remigration is being trialled in the United States. Donald Trump is reducing inflows by banning travel from named countries, cutting asylum and militarising his border. He's also increasing outflows by expelling as many people as he can on any pretext he can find. For instance, when an Egyptian asylum-seeker assaulted protesters in Colorado, the administration not only arrested the attacker but detained and is seeking to deport his entire family – a 'sins of the father' policy that judges are resisting. Elsewhere, the BBC's Simon Reeve has caused a stir by highlighting the integrationist policies of Denmark, a country that offers people cash to go home and dismantles ghettos. That this is done by social democrats comes as no surprise. Scandinavia is historically conformist; a welfare state requires high levels of solidarity to function. Evidence of my 'history-shapes-identity' theory is offered by how countries respond to the immigration challenge in light of their own traditions. Here, when a Reform UK MP asked the PM for his views on the burka, the PM had no answer and his MPs sounded as shocked as a maiden aunt offered cocaine. Why doesn't Labour want to have this debate? A cynic will say: it offends their core constituency. A Tory will claim: they don't really care about immigration. And yet Labour's immigration White Paper looks tough, and it has already increased deportations compared with the last government. Historically, it was Labour that restricted Commonwealth immigration in the 1960s, and Boris Johnson, of Brexit fame, who threw the borders open. Boris, who liked to play both sides of the immigration game, infamously compared the burka to a letter box – yet did not wish to ban it. Do we not say 'an Englishman's home is his castle'? By extension, they are free to wear whatever they want in the street. The problem, reply nationalists, is that by clinging to a liberal vision, we open the door to illiberal attitudes that might, by strength of conviction, overwhelm us. If the culture goes, our old values will follow. We are not, however, as tolerant as many assume. It has been reported that Prevent now regards 'cultural nationalism' – the fear that society 'is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration' – as a 'sub-category of extreme Right-wing terrorist ideologies', and thus worthy of referral to the authorities. GB News is up in arms – admittedly a permanent condition – but I've yet to hear a guest point out that white Christians are merely experiencing what the security services have done to Muslim Britons since 9/11: slander and harassment. Between 2016 and 2019, over 2,000 children under the age of nine were referred to Prevent, including a four-year-old Muslim boy who talked about a violent computer game at an after-school club. Right and Left are chasing a mirage of British liberalism that, in an age when you can get 31 months for a social-media post, no longer reflects reality. Immigration is ultimately a numbers game. A democratic society can get along fine with any minority, so long as it remains small in number. But when a government fails to police its borders, and thus loses control over numbers, it will feel obliged to police society to maintain harmony: monitoring, deporting, rewriting history, and indoctrinating us in a strange new variant on national character, a parody of kindness best described as 'sinister twee'. If you want a vision of the future, it is a Dawn French-shaped woman, with a midlife-crisis fringe, talking to you about diversity and inclusion as if you were a baby. Then, when you raise an objection, ending the discussion with a disturbingly final 'NO'.
Telegraph
an hour ago
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Time to face the harsh realities of spending orthodoxy
Labour came to power fatuously parroting the word 'change' and yet has shown itself to be the same old tax and spending party it has always been. What it meant was a change of party in office not a change of direction. Not only have taxes gone up but so-called protected spending is set to rise despite record debt levels. Yet if ever a public policy has been tested to destruction surely it is the notion that the NHS will improve if only more money is thrown at it. Even Sir Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, are on record as saying that higher health spending is not the answer to the endemic flaws in the health service and yet another £30 billion is to be announced for the next three years on top of the £22 billion handed over after last year's general election, much of which went on pay and showed nothing in the way of productivity improvement. No mainstream politician is prepared to acknowledge that the problem with the NHS is the fact it is a nationalised industry with all the inherent inefficiencies associated with such. Most other advanced economies in Europe and elsewhere have social insurance systems which work better. But the insistence in Britain of cleaving to the 1948 'founding principle' that treatment should be free at the point of delivery has become a quasi-religious doctrine that few dare challenge. Only Nigel Farage has questioned the wisdom of continuing with a system that patently fails to achieve what others manage to do but has been noticeably quiet on the subject recently because Labour will exploit it mercilessly to see off the Reform threat. Telling people that they will have to pay for something they have always had for free is even more difficult when political parties are prepared to see the health system get worse rather than reform it. The same is true of welfare. Taking benefits from people, even when they are payments introduced just a few years ago like the winter fuel allowance, is hard if the reasons are not explained and the issue is 'weaponised' by opponents. Yet unless the welfare budget is brought under control it will bankrupt the country. If change is to mean anything then we need politicians finally to understand the extent of the country's difficulties and make decisions accordingly. Will we see that from the Chancellor on Wednesday?
