BELOW IS A video of an appearance I made on the ‘Thinking Class’ podcast hosted by John Gillam. John is an intelligent and thoughtful interviewer, and I thoroughly recommend his own Substack.

John and I talked about the state of British politics and, in particular, the serious challenges our society faces in the way of economic insecurity, deindustrialisation, demographic transformation and social disintegration.

Though the interview was filmed a few months ago, all the issues we discussed remain entirely relevant.

Enjoy!

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A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

You probably won't agree with all of Mr Embery's policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

TRADE UNIONS ARE a force for good in our society, and I’ll make that argument to anyone who cares to listen. Name a right enjoyed by Britons at work – the minimum wage, sick pay, health and safety protections, annual holiday entitlement, take your pick – and the chances are that the trade union movement was instrumental in getting it on to the statute book.

Without the courage and efforts of generations of trade unionists, our workplaces would unquestionably be less safe and contented environments.

I became a trade union member at 16, later serving as a senior official, because I felt my own generation had a moral duty to make sure our hard-won rights were not rolled back. That’s why I always get behind campaigns and legislation, such as the recently-introduced Employment Rights Act, designed to safeguard and extend those advances.

But while there is so much about the trade union movement that has made me proud, there is one thing that has made me truly ashamed of it. And that is its contemptible role in the whole transgenderism debate and, in particular, its shameful abandonment of women fighting to defend their sex-based rights.

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The trade union movement has been on the wrong side of this debate since the beginning. Drunk on radical progressive ideology, which it had been imbibing for years, the movement succumbed to the overtures of the trans lobby and began to preach its gospel. Biological reality suddenly became irrelevant. In the name of ‘kindness’ and ‘inclusivity’, people were expected to comply with what in their hearts and heads they knew to be a lie.

Initially, the blowback was limited. But then the demands of the trans cultists became ever more extreme. They wanted individuals to have the right to ‘self-identify’ as members of the opposite sex, and they insisted that trans-identifying males be given the right to enter women-only spaces – including rape crisis centres and prisons – and take part in women’s sports.

And so women began to organise and fight back. But when they did so, they found that their trade unions were not standing with them.

Even in more recent years, with trans mania at long last on the retreat and after women have racked up a series of victories in the courts and tribunals, most unions have barely shifted their position and continue to sell their female members short.

Female nurses, in particular, have been in the frontline of the battle to defend sex-based rights in the workplace. Take the case of Jennifer Melle, an A&E nurse from south London. During a shift, Melle was racially abused by an aggressive trans-identifying male patient (who happened to be a convicted sex offender). Instead of defending her, Melle’s NHS Trust employer took disciplinary action against her. Why? Because during the exchange with the patient, she had used ‘incorrect’ pronouns – a cardinal sin in our woke-captured health service.

Last week, Melle won a much-deserved settlement payment from her employer. Good for her. But it was no thanks to her union which, despite the sheer injustice of it all, totally abandoned her.

In another high-profile case, Fife nurse Sandie Peggie found herself in hot water with her employer after challenging a trans-identifying male colleague using the women’s changing room. Like Melle, she found that her union turned its back on her in her hour of need. An employment tribunal later ruled that Peggie’s employer had harassed her.

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In a similar case, a group of nurses in Darlington stood firm after their employer tried to force them to share a changing room with a trans-identifying male. Once again, the trade union – in this case Unison – was nowhere to be seen. The president of the union even went so far as to accuse the nurses of ‘anti-trans bigotry’. An employment tribunal subsequently ruled that the nurses had suffered discrimination and harassment.

Though such legal victories should be seen as a shot in the arm for the campaign to defend women’s sex-based rights, trade unions usually look upon them as setbacks. When the Darlington tribunal judgment landed, Unison released a terse statement declaring that it stood by its ‘beliefs in the rights of our trans, non-binary and gender diverse members’.

What a deplorable response to a ruling that should have been shouted from the rooftops, and what a display of contempt towards a group of women whose courageous actions in defending their rights at work stood in the best traditions of trade unionism.

In my own industry, the fire and rescue service, women spent years fighting for better provisions – such as single-sex toilet facilities and washrooms – in the workplace. The struggle was, in a male-dominated environment, long and hard. But, with the help of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), they eventually they got there.

Now the FBU, on whose national executive I once sat, has bought fully into trans dogma and looks upon anyone who seeks to uphold the principle of biological reality as a bigot or reactionary. When the supreme court ruled last year that women and men were defined by biological sex for the purposes of law, the union condemned it as being on the ‘wrong side of history’ (whatever that means) and motivated by ‘far-right ideologies’.

What a betrayal of women firefighters past and present and of the union’s own proud history in the struggle for sex-based rights in the workplace.

I hope that the trade union movement soon comes to its sense and distances itself from the trans cult. Too often, women who run into trouble at work for standing up against gender fanaticism are being forced to rely on Christian groups or the Free Speech Union to come to their assistance. That is a genuine scandal. Britain’s mainstream trade unions should be throwing their considerable heft behind these women and defending them when they come under attack.

Trade unions are needed as much today as they ever were. The battle against injustice in the workplace never goes away. But if unions remain determined to alienate an entire sex class – and many others besides – through their continued embrace of an increasingly fringe ideology, they will be hastening the decline of their own influence. And, ultimately, that is neither in their own, nor - given the vital and beneficial work they often do for Britain’s workers - the country’s interests.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

You probably won't agree with all of Mr Embery's policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

I HAVE RECENTLY been reading Joseph Anton, the memoir of Sir Salman Rushdie, the esteemed novelist who, at the back end of the 1980s, infuriated some mullahs in Tehran by having the audacity to produce a work of fiction which, as they saw it, ‘blasphemed’ against their prophet.

The memoir – whose title was the alias adopted by Rushdie during the many years he spent in hiding – provides a captivating and often harrowing account of the daily life of a man living under a death sentence handed down by a despotic foreign government.

The author’s acute frustration at the timidity shown by certain members of the British political and media classes in the face of the bullying theocrats leaps from the pages. Government ministers equivocated; members of parliament in constituencies with sizeable Muslim populations denounced him; ‘liberal’ commentators implied that he had asked for it; the archbishop of Canterbury called for an extension of the Blasphemy Act to cover Islam.

Truth be told, they were petrified. Some may have privately wanted the man with the pen to prevail over those with the swords, but they weren’t willing to put their own necks on the line by publicly expressing solidarity with Rushdie or condemning his persecutors. So they took the path of least resistance.

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What is striking from reading the memoir – which, it should be noted, was published before the author was stabbed by an Islamist in New York – is how little the atmosphere has changed in the years since. If anything, it has become even more oppressive. Every now and then, something will occur to prove the point. The hounding of a schoolteacher in Batley. The censoring of an artistic work. The wilful institutional blindness to the activities of rape gangs. The de facto blasphemy laws. The general desperation of the political and cultural elites to delegitimise any criticism of multicultural ideology.

A mood of nervousness still abounds. The elites remain terrified of the potential reaction of certain radical tendencies within the Muslim community to any perceived slight against their religion. And so they abandon the principles of free expression and critical thought in favour of affording to Islam a degree of indulgence and protection that no other faith could possibly hope to enjoy.

Christians, especially, are expected to accept every bit of criticism and mockery that comes their way. Their faith is an easy target, because those who aim for it know they will never be subjected to a fatwa ordering their execution.

When, during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris in 2024 and before a global audience, the Last Supper was parodied by various crankish characters, including a couple of sexualised drag queens and a transgender model, there were many complaints, including from various Christian organisations. But there was never a hint that anyone involved with the performance would become a target. No threats of violence from Christian groups. No demands for revenge. The story was dead within a few days. Just imagine if the performance had centred instead on, say, the Qur’an story of Muhammad’s journey through the heavens on a winged horse.

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Similarly, last week, Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, tending the sick. The post was, like much of Trump’s output these days, in poor taste and caused some prominent Christian voices to publicly object and demand its deletion. But most of Christendom just rolled its eyes and went about its business. Again, no blood-curdling threats to kill or demands for retribution. Though they may have felt slighted, most Christians will have understood that, in democratic and pluralist societies, religious ideas and iconography cannot be protected against insult or lampoonery, and that believers are certainly not permitted to avenge their hurt feelings through violence.

In fairness, many Muslims also understand this and would not dream of persecuting – still less physically attacking – someone who had offended against their religion. And, lest I be accused of being an ‘Islamophobe’ (that awful word), I would point out that I believe there are aspects of the Islamic faith – such as the emphasis on family, community and self-restraint – that are commendable and, far from being ‘anti-British’, chime with the conservative and traditionalist sentiments of many non-Muslims across the country.

But the persistent threat from the faith’s militant elements has caused our weak-kneed political establishment to decide that some kind of special forcefield must be deployed around Islam, and that if anyone is stupid enough to breach it, they must expect the blowback.

Well, not in my name. Islam, regardless of the extreme views of a minority of its followers, must not be ringfenced in such a way, and if sections within it cannot reconcile themselves to that position, they must be confronted and, if necessary, dealt with under the law of the land. No quarter must be given to the bullies and fundamentalists.

There is a scene in the comedy film Alan Patridge: Alpha Papa in which Partridge, the Norfolk-based radio disc jockey, berates his studio sidekick off-mike for having made a rude on-air wisecrack about Islam. ‘Never – never – criticise Muslims,’ barks a flustered Partridge. ‘Only – only – Christians.’ He pauses. ‘And Jews a little bit.’

Yep. That just about sums up where we are.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

You probably won't agree with all of Mr Embery's policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

THERE IS A scene in the TV adaptation of that superb 1980s political novel, A Very British Coup, in which Labour prime minister Harry Perkins, determined to push through a new green energy policy, is rebuked by the leader of the United Power Workers’ Union, a character named Reg Smith. ‘My union see job losses ahead,’ argues the battle-hardened Smith, ‘and they won’t be bought off with promises of windmills’.

It was later revealed that Smith was something of a bad egg, but I am reminded of his slapdown every time I hear Labour leaders try to convince working people that the net zero crusade is in their interests.

You wouldn’t necessarily know it, but there are some in today’s trade union movement who have not succumbed to the militant environmentalism that has consumed much of the left (and a good deal of the right, too). They don’t always get much of a hearing, but they exist and, with the Iran war folly threatening both an economic and energy crisis, they are coming out swinging.

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You probably won't agree with all of Mr Embery's policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

I WOULD NOT wish to live in a country that did not permit genuine freedom of religion. The regimes in such places tend not to be very pleasant, and it can be certain that where citizens are not allowed to follow the faith of their choosing, other fundamental liberties will also be curtailed.

A nation, if it is to be regarded as civilised, must surely grant licence, within the wider law, to religious believers to participate freely in all the rituals associated with their particular belief system.

Polling data shows this to be the majority view among Britons – a welcome state of affairs which serves to demonstrate the tolerant and accepting character of our country (while refuting the canard, repeatedly tossed out by various liberal catastrophisers, that we live in some hate-filled cesspit).

So when the shadow justice secretary, Nick Timothy, expressed his disapproval of the spectacle of a large number of Muslims taking part in an organised mass prayer at an ‘open iftar’ in London’s Trafalgar Square recently, arguing that it amounted to an ‘act of domination’, one might have assumed that his comments would be roundly denounced.

Certainly several of his political opponents inveighed against him, and in some cases called for his sacking. But the condemnation wasn’t universal. In fact, a number of voices across politics, the commentariat and social media came to Timothy’s defence, arguing that he had started a legitimate debate about the permissibility of mass ritual prayer in public spaces, and that they, too, had been uneasy at the Trafalgar Square scenes.

The mixed response stands in stark contrast to the zeitgeist just a few years ago, when such remarks by a prominent politician would almost certainly have sounded the death knell for both his career and reputation, and is illustrative not only of the extent to which the political weather in these islands has changed, but also how the broad consensus that existed in the SW1 bubble on issues such as immigration, integration and diversity is splintering.

I strongly suspect that Timothy’s remarks will have struck a chord with large numbers of people across the country, including many who would generally see themselves as upholders of religious tolerance. Why might that be so? Why would anyone who purports to support freedom of religion bridle at the spectacle of a mass public prayer by Muslims?

I think there are some fairly straightforward answers to these questions. Britain remains, officially at least, a Christian country. England has an established church; Scotland a national one (though some contend that this, too, is established). Census data shows that Christians represent, by some margin, the largest group among those who profess a religious belief.

Millions are, of course, irreligious. But many of these will – like that standard bearer of atheists, Professor Richard Dawkins – consider themselves Christians in a cultural sense. So they celebrate the faith’s major festivals; they enjoy singing and listening to hymns; they feel moved when entering an ancient church or cathedral; and they understand that Christianity is deeply intertwined with our history as a nation, moulding the character of our society over a thousand years and shaping our laws, customs, language, politics, architecture and music.

These people are, I think, inclined to believe that Christianity has, by and large, been a force for good inside their country. They feel, even as non-believers, an affinity with it; and they are reluctant to see its total erasure from our national life or its supplantation by some other faith.

Taken together, actual Christians and cultural Christians make up a clear majority throughout the country, suggesting that, for all its diminishing influence, there is life in the old faith yet.

Despite this, however, it is undeniable that the phenomenon of mass immigration, coupled with the obsession of our political and cultural elites and national institutions with championing multiculturalism at every opportunity, has meant that the complexion of Britain is changing fast, precipitating the gradual replacement of a dominant overarching culture – of which Christianity was a key component – with, well, everything and nothing.

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And the multiculturalism promoted by the elites is, in any case, not genuine multiculturalism. Rather, it is asymmetric multiculturalism, a construct which sees minority cultures enthusiastically celebrated, while the majority culture is consistently downplayed (and often denigrated).

This has led many among the majority culture to feel that their identity is being, if not erased, then slowly eroded, and that, as a consequence, they are losing their status in society. For this reason, a resentment has been building among them, coupled with a belief that Britain is approaching some sort of inflection point – a pivotal moment throwing up a choice between holding on to the country we are, and have long been, or turning into something new and unrecognisable.

They perceive, too, that their tolerance and goodwill have been taken for granted. Many of the changes foisted upon their communities and country were effected without their consent – and often in the face of their opposition. Time and again they expressed their feelings at the ballot box; time and again they were ignored.

Globalisation, even when it meant deindustrialisation and rapid demographic transformation, was good for them, they were told. Economically and spiritually enriching. Embrace it or be condemned as a ‘Little Englander’ or xenophobe.

A populace that was broadly agreeable to properly-regulated immigration and a modest degree of cultural diffusion had these things forced upon them in turbo-charged form. And guess what? They didn’t much like it. What they would have accepted in moderation, they rejected when it came at them uncurbed. For many, the upheaval caused through the rush to a new globalised economy had changed their lives, communities and country too fundamentally for them to just go on sucking it up.

It is this sentiment that, I am quite sure, explains why some members of the majority culture may have, like Nick Timothy, been uncomfortable with the spectacle of the mass iftar in London. It isn’t that they are racists or bigots. Neither is it that they believe Muslims should not be entitled to pray to their God. Rather, it is that the event – held inside an iconic square and under the watchful eye of a British military hero – served as a very public exemplification of the unwelcome transformational shift that has taken place inside their country.

Would these citizens have felt the same way if it had been Jews, Sikhs or Hindus at prayer? In most cases, probably not. Or at least any disquiet would have been less marked. But even that isn’t necessarily a sign of an irrational or hateful disposition towards Muslims. For it cannot be denied that, of all the non-Christian religions which have played a role in reshaping the cultural contours of our country in recent years, Islam – the most confident and assertive of them – has been the major contributor.

It is beyond question, too, that Islam, more than other religions, contains the kind of militant and radical strains – some of them highly-organised and vocal – that do not sit easily with Britain’s traditions of democracy and pluralism, and that there exist within it elements who see unbelievers – ‘infidels’ – as something less than human.

Such attitudes have manifested themselves in ways that have jarred – and sometimes horrified – the sensibilities of non-Muslims. The rape gangs scandal, the hounding of the Batley schoolteacher, the persecution of Sir Salman Rushdie, the barbarous terror attacks, the censorship of art and literature, the de facto blasphemy laws, the spectacle of a Wakefield mother prostrating herself before a group of angry Muslim men because her son had accidentally scuffed a copy of the Koran: it is simply unreasonable to expect people, even if they understand that not every Muslim is culpable, to avoid drawing a direct line between these things and Islam. Or to believe that Islam presents no greater a threat to the social fabric of the nation than does Judaism, Sikhism or Hinduism.

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So we should be slow to condemn those who feel a certain unease when they hear of mass Islamic ritual prayer events in public places. Or when Premier League football matches are paused to allow Muslim players to break their fast. Or when Ramadan lights are officially displayed along the capital city’s main thoroughfares (including, on at least one occasion, over the Easter weekend). Or when Sharia councils are given licence to operate. Or when – as appears to be the case at the time of writing – the king declines to issue a special message for Easter despite doing so for Ramadan just a few weeks previously.

In isolation, some of these things may seem inconsequential and barely worth troubling over. And those who do trouble over them, even in the most temperate way, will know that they are inviting the scorn of high-minded progressives everywhere. But small, incremental changes can slowly – and sometimes not so slowly – coagulate and create fundamental shifts. As the Catholic writer Niall Gooch puts it: ‘Countries don’t lose their coherence and distinctiveness in one fell swoop, by one single and obvious blow; but instead thanks to a constant acid erosion of all that makes them unique and self-confident.’

It’s all very well demanding that dissenters anxious about such changes ‘live and let live’ or show unlimited tolerance. But when the shift is in a direction that they do not wish to travel, such strictures are idle.

So is there a route through all this? Is there a way to arrest the decline of social solidarity and rise of communal sectarianism that we are witnessing in our communities? Is it too late to prevent the divisions that are playing out around us from widening?

Certainly there are no easy answers. But, as a start, we must recognise that multiculturalism – by which I mean hard multiculturalism; the state-sponsored variety that actively promotes separateness and difference for their own sake – has failed.

Instead of creating a country in which citizens from different cultures live in happy coexistence and in a spirit of peace, harmony and mutual respect, it has given us instead a land, if not of strangers, then of growing estrangement, a place where different identity groups go about their business quite often insulated from each other. Perhaps the effects of this are less deleterious in the gentrified districts of London or other fashionable cities where well-heeled liberal utopians – including a large number of our political and media classes – live their lives. Doubtless the wide variety of trendy restaurants serving exotic foreign cuisine and the availability of cheap au pairs help to persuade such people that multiculturalism really is a thing worth celebrating. But in the Bradfords and Birminghams and Barkings (and here I speak from personal experience) it is a different beast entirely. For it is in such places – the grittier, hard-pressed towns and cities of our country – that multiculturalism has really been put to the test. And it hasn’t fared well.

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So it seems to me that we face a stark choice. Either we continue along the current path, whereby our leaders persist in imploring us all to go on celebrating the fact that we are so different from each other and pretending that ‘diversity is our strength’, or we try to confidently reassert an overarching majority culture – the same one as fortified our country through many generations until a couple of decades or so ago.

The first option would, I fear, lead to the slow Lebanonisation of Britain, a process which would see our country become ever more divided along religious, ethnic and cultural lines, with a myriad of disparate identity groups retreating to their own tribes and living parallel existences from each other, such that, sooner or later, the divisions become formally reflected in political and institutional governance.

The second option must therefore be the preference. But it would take political courage. It would mean adopting a Japanese-style approach, whereby the longstanding national culture is unapologetically promoted above all others and public leaders and institutions do not obsess about championing cultural diversity as a good in itself. It is no coincidence that Japan can boast levels of civility, order and cohesion far in excess of most countries. Shared identity, common cultural bonds and universal moral codes are essential in engendering that kind of high-trust society. They are also critical in ensuring sustained public support for such concepts as wealth redistribution and the welfare state.

That isn’t to say that minority rights shouldn’t exist or that minorities shouldn’t be free to make their own cultural choices, including following their desired religion and exercising their right to freedom of expression and assembly. In other words, soft multiculturalism, the type that recognises and is willing to permit individual choice in such matters.

But when it comes to public policy, including decisions over the use of public resources or spaces, we should reject the view that all cultures are equal and therefore entitled to identical provisions. Instead, we should unashamedly place the national majority culture above all others.

So, on matters of faith, for example, only the religion of the established or national churches – Christianity – should be promoted by public bodies and institutions. By all means, hold your iftars in your mosques and homes; you should have every right to do so. But don’t expect the police or local authority to grant you a licence to do it as part of some officially-recognised event, and where it is likely to create a major spectacle or disrupt the lives of others. (It should be noted, incidentally, that the Trafalgar Square iftar was held in the shadow of St Martin-in-the Field, one of the nation’s most iconic churches. I do wonder what the reaction might have been if a large number of Christians had conducted a mass prayer session outside the central mosque in Bradford.)

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Plainly any attempt to reassert an overarching majority culture would be less effective if immigration were allowed to continue at the pace and scale of recent years. So a sharp reduction in numbers must be a priority. One could not seriously claim to wish to halt the deepening fragmentation of our society without also accepting that net migration figures must in the future be more modest and manageable.

Liberal sophisticates will, of course, recoil in horror at all this, just as they went into meltdown over Nick Timothy’s remarks. C’est la vie. Their beliefs, implemented with such enthusiasm over so many years, have brought us to where we are. They need to accept that the status quo has failed and will go on failing.

It is, in the end, possible to remain – or, should I say, return to being – a decent, civilised and harmonious society without genuflecting at every opportunity to every minority culture or believing that they are all worthy of the same treatment as the one that has been dominant in these islands for far longer than any of us can remember. The greater the level of cultural diversity, and the more we adopt a hodgepodge approach to these matters, the lower the levels of trust and solidarity in our communities. That is a truth that, sooner or later, we are all going to have to recognise.

Happy Easter.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

You probably won't agree with all of Mr Embery's policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

I WAS ONE of the few people on the political left who did not recoil in horror on either occasion that Donald Trump was elected as US president. I didn’t like the man and, if I were American, wouldn’t have voted for him. I found him crude, obnoxious and oafish. I still do.

But on some of the big questions confronting the West, he was undoubtedly on the right side of the argument. He understood the importance of the nation state and sovereignty. He saw that mass and uncontrolled immigration could be economically and socially disruptive. He spoke the language of reindustrialisation and was willing to face down the green zealots. He had no time for woke dogma and recognised the damage and divisions it had caused. He promised an end to US-inspired ‘forever wars’ which had caused death and mayhem across the globe. And he represented, for many, a welcome counterweight to the doctrine of technocratic liberal internationalism that had come to dominate Western political institutions. All of that was rather refreshing.

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You probably won't agree with all of Mr Embery's policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

FOR ALL THE impassioned commentary, intrigue and invective, politics is quite a simple business. Or, at least, it should be.

Anyone who has travelled beyond the boundaries of Britain’s fashionable cities and university towns in the past two or three decades will know that voters in such parts – what you might call ‘normies’ – are more united in their desires and demands than many within the establishment seem to realise.

These voters are often to the left on economic issues – so they want to see strong public services, full employment, decent wages and pensions, and an end to huge wealth and income disparities.

But they are frequently to the right on cultural issues – so they have a firm belief in the concepts of family, community and nation; they want immigration to be tightly managed and criminals to be properly punished; and, though broadly tolerant, they aren’t excessively enthusiastic about multiculturalism or trans rights.

For decades, these voters have been neglected by the main establishment parties. Sure, these parties will often pay lip service to them and claim to be on their side. But they aren’t really.

That is because, on social and economic issues, these parties have embraced hyper-liberalism – a creed characterised by worship of the market and the self over the common good. And, in doing so, they have alienated many millions who had little time for this new orthodoxy and saw that it was laying waste to much of what they held dear.

For a long time, these voters sucked it up. But then, through Brexit, they began to make their voices heard. And in the decade since, those voices have become ever louder.

The old tribal loyalties are now disintegrating. The obligation that millions felt to vote a certain way because that’s what their parents or grandparents did no longer holds. The two parties that dominated the scene for over a century are in the political equivalent of intensive care, and nobody can be sure if they will make a full recovery.

Every now and then, a piece of evidence will emerge to demonstrate the profound extent of the realignment that is taking place. This week, it was a poll, carried out by Ipsos, illustrating support for political parties according to the financial wellbeing of voters. Respondents were broken down into four groups: ‘comfortably off’, ‘financially stable’, ‘just about coping’ and ‘financially precarious or extremely vulnerable’.

The data tells a story about how dramatically the Labour party’s support base has shifted. Of those in the poorest category, only 12% intended to vote Labour. Think on that for a moment. Just 12% of the most hard-up people in Britain would vote for the party which was created over a century ago to represent them and has throughout most of its history managed to command their support. What a remarkable turnaround.

So where are these votes going instead? Well, the preferred choice of 34% of them is Reform UK. Again, this is something of a staggering statistic, not least because Reform is ideologically a right-wing, free market Thatcherite party, and the working-class provinces in which many of these voters will reside were badly scarred by that type of philosophy when it was inflicted on them in the 1980s.

It is likely that many of these voters understand that history only too well. But their support for Reform is perhaps a sign that they feel it speaks for them on issues beyond the economy which matter to them a great deal. So the party’s commitment to defending national sovereignty, reducing immigration and challenging the woke dogma that pervades our institutions – as well as its more traditionalist stance on cultural issues generally – resonates with them, because they feel, rightly or wrongly, that it gives hope of a return to the sort of country they loved but have lost.

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The distribution of votes among the richest group surveyed in the poll is also quite striking. Among this ‘comfortably off’ cohort, 33% indicated that they would vote Labour (the largest share by some margin of any party), while just 18% opted for Reform. So the alleged party of the working class attracts a substantially higher proportion of votes from the wealthiest people in the country than does a party created and run by individuals who are themselves longstanding members of the financial elite. This truly is politics turned upside down.

For Labour, the poll findings stand as proof that there has been a massive oversteer towards servicing the priorities of the nation’s professional and managerial classes – such that its support among the working classes has plummeted.

Not that it is likely to happen, but if Reform were to ditch some of the free-market idolatry and adopt a more left-leaning economic programme, which included interventionist policies aimed at bringing about full employment, reindustrialisation and genuine levelling up, its current levels of support among Britain’s most hard-pressed voters might rise even higher. Left on the economy, right on culture: that remains the sweet spot electorally.

At any rate, what we can be certain about is that the tectonic plates continue to shift violently. And, as they do so, the landscape of British politics is being dramatically rearranged.

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A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

ON THURSDAY, I joined the Spiked podcast to discuss the Iran war, digital ID, the attack on trial by jury, and the introduction of a new ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ speech code.

The episode can be viewed below.

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A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

You probably won't agree with all of Mr Embery's policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

SO THEY WENT and did it. After much wrangling, and in the face of a good deal of resistance, the government has unveiled its official definition of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’.

The definition – which runs to three paragraphs and has been introduced as part of a broader social cohesion plan – is designed to arrest what ministers say is a rising tide of hatred towards Muslims.

The text lays out what type of actions or behaviour will be deemed to cross the line. This can be, for example, ‘prejudicial stereotyping of Muslims, or people perceived to be Muslim, including because of their ethnic or racial backgrounds or their appearance, and treating them as a collective group defined by fixed and negative characteristics, with the intention of encouraging hatred against them…’

Where to begin with that word salad?

Critics have raised the alarm over the implications for free speech, arguing that there is potential for the definition to stifle legitimate scrutiny of both the religion of Islam itself and some its more controversial customs and practices. They also point to the fact that words such as ‘prejudicial’ and ‘negative’, as they appear in the above passage, are highly subjective, meaning that application of the definition may be wildly inconsistent.

These concerns are well-founded. There are few good reasons to support the introduction of this definition and plenty to oppose it. It has all the makings of a back-door blasphemy law and will persuade people that it is safer to just button their lip rather than express their genuinely-held beliefs in any discussion about Islam or Muslims.

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THE GORTON AND DENTON by-election was an unpleasant affair in so many ways. But one redeeming feature of the contest was its sparking of a long-overdue national debate on the subject of non-British citizens holding the right to vote in British elections.

For many Britons, this appears to have come as something of a revelation. Could it really be true that persons who are not citizens of our country are permitted to rock up to a polling booth and play a part in choosing the local MP? And is it also the case that these individuals have enjoyed that right from the moment they set foot on our shores?

Well, yes, these things are perfectly true. And not only for elections to the House of Commons, but also the Scottish parliament, Welsh Senedd, Northern Ireland assembly, and for elected mayors, local councillors, and police and crime commissioners.

Not every type of non-British citizen is entitled to vote in every category of election - certain rules, such as the requirement to be a ‘qualifying’ Commonwealth or EU citizen, are usually applied – but the fact remains that around two million people, possibly more, who do not hold a British passport are routinely helping to determine the composition of democratic chambers and offices throughout our land.

The issue reared its head in Gorton and Denton on account of the large number of people with Pakistani heritage living there. With Pakistan being a member of the Commonwealth, anyone from that country who was in Britain legally and resident in the constituency was free to cast a ballot in the by-election. With concerns also having been expressed over the integrity of postal voting and reports of widespread ‘family voting’ in the by-election, the entire arrangement is at last being subjected to some proper public scrutiny - and has unsurprisingly led to demands that the current system be overhauled.

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Conferring on non-British citizens an entitlement to vote in British elections is plainly indefensible. Perverse, even. The right to elect candidates to public office – especially to positions in which they wield significant political influence – should be reserved solely to those who hold British citizenship. No ifs, no buts.

I do not argue that non-British citizens should not otherwise be encouraged to play a full role in our civic life or that their views should be considered irrelevant. On the contrary, many of them will have much to offer us, and we can hardly complain about a lack of integration if we deny them the opportunity to be active participants in the life of our nation.

But extending voting rights to individuals who are not fully-fledged citizens – and may indeed not desire to become so – serves only to demean the franchise. As with any club or association, only those who are properly-accredited members should have the right to choose its officials and determine its rules. For a nation state, such a principle is even more fundamental. When a nation extends such rights to foreign nationals, it undermines the unique nature of the bond that exists between its own citizens and the state. Worse, it devalues the concept of nationality itself, as there can be no greater expression of national belonging and identity than having an exclusive say in the democratic affairs of the nation of which one is formally a citizen.

If I happened to find myself living as a British national in Pakistan, I would not for a moment expect to be placed on the electoral register and invited to help decide who should run that country. And if such an invitation were made to me, I think, out of principle, that I would decline.

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Why does it always seem that Britain does incomprehensible things like this? While it is true that the arrangement is a legacy of Empire – when anyone born within His Majesty’s dominions was deemed to be a natural-born British subject – its continuation decades later and in an age of mass immigration, as well as its extension to additional cohorts, makes no sense.

The situation should, of course, have been put right long ago. But when a country’s political and cultural institutions are dominated, as Britain’s have long been, by a metropolitan liberal elite which believes in open borders, regards everyone as a ‘citizen-of-the-world’, commands us relentlessly to be ‘inclusive’ and ‘tolerant’, and sees the relationship between citizen and nation as a purely functional and not emotional one, who in authority was ever going to have the courage to protest about it? These are ‘good people’ doing a ‘good thing’ in standing up for minorities, and anyone expressing an objection must have sinister motives.

Well, I do object. I do not see why I, a British citizen for over half a century, should have no greater say in my country’s democratic processes than someone who has been here for five minutes, does not intend to stay for any length of time, perhaps has little affinity for Britain or interest in its long-term future, and has no desire to ever seek citizenship. To defend such an arrangement is surely to render the concept of citizenship meaningless.

Reform UK has pledged to scrap foreign nationals’ voting rights if it wins power. But the change needs to happen well before then. For the status quo is untenable. And it is debauching our entire electoral system.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

THERE IS A revolution taking place in British politics. What happened early this morning in an unglamorous corner of Greater Manchester is proof that something seismic is occurring.

Some will argue that by-election protest votes against sitting governments are a feature of our political landscape and nothing significant should be read into the verdict of the electorate in Gorton and Denton.

They are wrong. Sure, all governments experience mid-term unpopularity, and voter anger is often expressed through the mechanism of by-elections. But in years past, a by-election defeat for the governing party in one of its own seats invariably meant a victory for the official opposition or the Liberal Democrats. In Gorton and Denton, these outcomes were never on the cards.

What we saw instead was Labour battling to hold on to the constituency in the face of a major advance by two insurgent parties – Reform and the Greens – who can presently boast no more than a smattering of parliamentary seats between them. And one of these parties ended up securing a momentous victory, while the other grabbed second place.

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I RECENTLY WATCHED In the Land of Saints and Sinners, a shoot-em-up type of film starring Liam Neeson and set amid the Troubles in 1970s Ireland. The movie was, as one might expect, replete with the cultural staples and fashions of that time and place: flared trousers, sideburns, cigarette smoke, pints of Guinness and, of course, gun-toting terrorists.

As the plot begins to unfold, Neeson’s character, a contract killer, can be seen travelling to a small coastal town in County Donegal, whereupon he enters a pub. Some sort of traditional Irish shindig is taking place and, as the camera pans round, the viewer sees a man playing the fiddle. Nothing unusual there, one might think.

Except that this musician is a black man.

After finishing his tune, the fiddler wanders over to the bar and begins chatting with Neeson’s character. He speaks with a strong African accent, and we learn that he hails from some war-torn country. The pair engage in a bit of small-talk, and the film promptly moves on.

It was, of course, a faintly ridiculous scene. This was 1970s small-town Donegal. If, in real life, a person had, in that place and at that time, entered a pub in which someone was playing traditional Irish music on a fiddle, it is almost certain that the performer would not have been a black man from Africa.

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The scene immediately jarred with me, as, I suspect, it did with others who viewed it. The whole thing seemed forced. The African fiddler appeared to have no particular relevance to the plot. His presence in the production seemed ahistorical and incongruous. It would be a bit like watching a film set in a tribal village in 1970s Africa and seeing Paddy McGinty hammering away on the old djembe drums.

The segment had the feel of having been shoe-horned into the film for reasons entirely unrelated to the storyline. As though the producers were trying to impart some sort of message. Which, of course, they were. The message being that they, the producers, are imbued with ‘progressive’ values, that they are proud cheerleaders for multicultural ideology, that films featuring all-white casts are inherently baneful (even where they reflect historical truth), and that they are willing to compromise the integrity and credibility of their work for the purpose of making their ‘enlightened’ views known to their audience. I certainly struggle to see any other plausible explanation for the decision to write the scene into the script.

It isn’t only film-makers, of course, who are guilty of this kind of virtue signalling. The entire phenomenon plagues our creative and cultural sector - to the point where it has become impossible to ignore. Television entertainment (especially drama), advertising, museums, libraries, the arts, publishing, tourism: these are just some of the industries whose chiefs seem intent on portraying our country and its history in ways that are wildly inconsistent with reality, often by crudely over-representing minority communities and cultures while downplaying – or, worse, constantly besmirching – the role of the majority population and culture.

Some years ago, I read a few of the crime novels of author Stephen Booth. The stories were set around the Peak District and centred on the work of detective duo Ben Cooper and Diane Fry. They were recently adapted for television by Channel 5. Inexplicably, Detective Constable Fry, an ordinary white British female officer in the books, was portrayed by an actress of Indian Punjabi descent. I am not sure what the audience was supposed to make of this. Was this ‘colour-blind casting’ at work? Or was the character herself an Indian Punjabi who had somehow acquired a quintessentially English name? I didn’t bother watching the series and so have no idea if any explanation was forthcoming.

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Similarly, a 2021 ITV adaptation of HE Bates’s The Darling Buds of May (titled The Larkins), set in 1950s rural Kent (about as ethnically and culturally homogenous a place as ever existed), was made to look as if it were located in contemporary Islington. Again, was this colour-blind casting in action? Or were the producers genuinely trying to convince us that this was how the Kent countryside looked seven decades ago?

‘Ah, but it’s fiction,’ some people will say, ‘and you can do anything you like with fiction’. Well, to a point. If, for example, a piece of work is intended to take you to a different world – something that falls within the genres of, say, fantasy or sci-fi – the producers may rightly take all sorts of liberties. But if the work is rooted in places and periods, or around events, that are – or were – real, and that actual living persons would ordinarily recognise and identify with, is there not some sort of duty to reflect these things, as well as one is able to, accurately? I think there is.

So when producers engage in deliberate distortion of this kind, they can hardly complain if their work is afforded less respect than would otherwise be the case. After all, the best productions are those that are plausible – those that, because of their believability, wholly capture the viewer or reader so that, for a short time, he is immersed in the world before him. As soon as I saw the African fiddler in In the Land of Saints and Sinners, I was wrenched from my absorption in the film and reminded that I was watching a work of total fiction – and not a very credible one at that.

I have, in fact, been making the case for some years now that, for many, this cultural and historical revisionism has become a relentless and tedious moral lecture. One need only speak to one’s fellow citizens in the pub or at work, or follow debates on social media, to comprehend the degree to which the phenomenon has had a corrosive and alienating effect, such that public faith in the bodies and institutions responsible for driving it has nosedived.

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Needless to say, my stance has persuaded certain opponents to accuse me of, well, you can guess. Anyone who dares challenge the persistent and politically-motivated falsifying of reality in this way is liable to have all sorts of nonsense thrown at him by the sanctimonious wokerati.

So it was with a sense of vindication that I read recently that an independent review into BBC output had concluded that the corporation’s over-representation of ethnic minority characters in its drama productions – especially in period dramas – can feel ‘clunky’, ‘inauthentic’ and ‘preachy’ to the viewer. The review, which was commissioned by the Beeb itself, found that diversity (let’s call it hyper-diversity, for that is what it is) can often seem ‘superimposed, rather than arising out of the subject matter’. This, suggest the authors, may leave viewers feeling as though they are ‘being lectured’.

The review cites a 2023 BBC adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder is Easy, which, though a traditional murder mystery set in an English village, bizarrely incorporated themes of anti-colonialism and West African Yoruba culture. It also questions the authenticity of the casting choices for the police drama Shetland, which has featured a string of characters of ethnic minority heritage – from countries as far afield as Tanzania, Sri Lanka and Jamaica – even though in real life the ethnic minority population of the Shetland islands, which lie between the Scottish mainland and Norway, stands at just 1%.

The review also finds that there is a perception among viewers that the BBC ‘can still be London-centric and skewed towards the middle class’, and that ‘the London-based perspective can cause programme-makers and commissioners to assume that the rest of the UK is close to London’s demographics’.

Speaking of the corporation’s executives who commission programmes, one stakeholder told the authors, rather fascinatingly, ‘Every single one of them lives within 15 miles of each other. They go to the same restaurants, and they read the same books. They go to the same plays, and they have the same friends.’

Perhaps the most instructive passage of the review was this one: ‘What needs to be avoided is ethnic diversity which looks forced and tick box, and we found our interviewees of colour as emphatic on this point as those who were white.’ In other words, the hyper-diversity zealots do not even enjoy the support of ethnic minorities in their crusade. So on behalf of whom are they are actually crusading? Only themselves, it would seem.

Maybe, just maybe, the tide is beginning to turn on these hucksters. If that proves to be the case, it won’t be a moment too soon.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

One of the features of modern politics in Britain is the disdain felt by our elites for anything resembling sovereignty or democratic accountability. We saw it in the transfer of powers over a long time from elected representatives in these islands to Eurocrats in Brussels, and in more recent years to faceless officials running the Bank of England or any number of arms-length quangos.

We observe it, too, in the words of the current prime minister, who says openly that he prefers Davos to Westminster. In the minds of liberal universalists, distant, top-down bureaucracy and technocracy are always a better bet than local, bottom-up democracy.

It is in that vein that the Labour government is proposing a drastic reorganisation of local government in England. Yes, I know that the intricacies of municipal governance do not exactly float the boats of many voters. But these proposals really are quite radical and deserve scrutiny. For if they see the light of day, they will gut local democracy.

The government wants to abolish existing district and county councils and merge them into single, sprawling unitary authorities. These bodies would then be responsible for the delivery of all council services in their designated area. Individuals will still be elected to them, of course, but councillors will be fewer in number and far more remote and anonymous than is currently the case.

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The new authorities are set to be up and running by 2028. To facilitate the reorganisation, the government has cancelled a number of elections to existing local councils that had been scheduled for later this year – a controversial move that has already sparked widespread anger among voters.

The government is proposing the reform in the name of rationalisation and efficiency. In reality, it will be an exercise in democratic butchery. The county of Norfolk, for example, stands to see a reduction in the number of councils from eight (seven district councils and one county council) to potentially just one. And large and distinct settlements such as Colchester, Brighton and Hove, Southampton and Cambridge will see their dedicated councils dismantled and gobbled up by the new ‘super councils’.

Given the general anti-politics sentiment that exists throughout much of the country, some voters may welcome the idea. ‘The fewer politicians, the better,’ they might argue. But they should be careful what they wish for. Local democracy matters. District councillors, especially, fulfil a crucial role. They are usually rooted in the community, know personally many of their electors, understand the problems afflicting the area, and provide a direct, tangible and human link to the decision-making process. Little wonder that polling shows voters are more likely to trust local politicians than national ones.

If district councils are subsumed into single unitary authorities, the number of local councillors may be slashed by around 90%. And, of course, those who remain will be representing geographical areas – and, by extension, numbers of electors – far vaster than is currently the case. This can only mean a system of governance which is deeply bureaucratic, impersonal and less responsive to local demands.

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The government asserts that the changes will enable local authorities to drive economic growth and accelerate housebuilding. But these arguments seem weak. Our lack of growth is ultimately attributable to problems far more deep-seated than anything to do with the structure of local government. And the Labour government of 1945-51 built a million council homes when there were far more local authorities in place than exist today. ‘Where there’s a will…’ and all that.

The consultation process on the proposals has just concluded, and the government is set to make its final decisions in the spring. But there are already signs that it may have bitten off more than it can chew. For a small, grassroots revolt may be brewing. According to the Economist, the National Association of Local Councils (NALC) reports that an ‘unusual number’ of town and parish councils are being created - many in the south-east of England, where the planned reorganisation is most extensive.

Town and parish councils (which are essentially the same thing, but named differently according to whether the council covers a town or village) are the first tier of local government. Around 30% of England’s communities are served by them, with significant tracts of the country currently ‘unparished’. According to NALC, town and parish councils ‘possess significant, and often under-utilised, powers’, including in the areas of planning and development, delivery of local services, and the ability more generally to take action that enhances the quality of life in the areas they serve. They can even raise revenue through their own precept.

The surge in applications to create town and parish councils – a right enshrined in legislation for those living in unparished areas – may well be linked to voter concern over the government’s planned local government reorganisation and the belief that it will disembowel local democracy. It is hard to think of another explanation for it.

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In Margate in Kent, for instance, a large coastal resort which is currently unparished, local electors have rallied behind a proposal to establish a new town council. The wheels are now in motion, and the new council is likely to come into existence next year. Given the choice of seeing their town subsumed entirely into a hulking new unitary authority covering anything up to two million electors or having an additional local tier of government dedicated to their particular needs, local voters plumped for the latter.

What this shows is that local democracy – that vital link between elector and community representative – still matters to people. What it also demonstrates is that the government’s proposal to force lumbering new bureaucracies on them may seriously backfire.

The whiff of local revolution is in the air. The government may discover that its attempts to create ‘super councils’ is destined meet with, well, super resistance.

Amen to that.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

THE GREAT parliamentarian Tony Benn would frequently insist that politics should be about ‘issues, not personalities’. He was right. In the modern media age, and with everything they say and do broadcast in high definition, it undeniably helps for a politician to be blessed with character and charm.

But personal charisma is ultimately secondary to political substance. If the policy and programme are wrong and run contrary to the interests of the majority of voters, all the wit and repartee in the world won’t bring electoral success.

That’s why the current frenzy over the Labour leadership carries nothing of the significance outside the SW1 bubble as it does inside it. The identity of the person in the hot seat is, for ordinary voters, of little real importance. What matters is the decisions he or she makes while occupying it.

Don’t misunderstand me: the Lord Mandelson affair that has rocked the Keir Starmer leadership is a genuine scandal and deserves maximum exposure. Moreover, Starmer himself was already crushingly unpopular, and that state of affairs is unlikely to change. He will almost certainly be gone by the summer.

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I was recently invited back on to the popular ‘Heretics’ podcast, hosted by the former BBC presenter Andrew Gold.

Andrew and I spoke about the reasons for Britain’s obvious decline, immigration, multiculturalism and social cohesion, the growing demands for ‘remigration’ (which I fiercely oppose), the erosion of free speech, and the diminishing influence of Christianity in our nation (and what it means for our future).

The full interview can be viewed below. Enjoy!

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A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

Dogmatism is not an attractive trait in any politician. While political representatives should of course be guided by principle and conviction, they should not be so blinded by ideology that they refuse to look facts squarely in the face.

For example, could any true and honest Tory seriously believe that their party suffered the calamitous defeat it did at the general election in 2024 because it wasn’t liberal and progressive enough? That the British electorate were crying out for more of the soggy, technocratic ‘centrism’ that had dominated Westminster politics for most of the previous three decades, but felt that the Conservative party just wasn’t offering it?

Well, it seems there are some in the Tory ranks who do believe such things. Many of them have thrown their weight behind a new movement, ‘Prosper UK’, created by former leader of the Scottish Conservatives Ruth Davidson and erstwhile West Midlands mayor Sir Andy Street. The aim of the movement, say the pair, is to drag the Tories away from divisive populism and back to the sensible centre where, apparently, hordes of disaffected mainstream voters are to be found.

Prominent Tory ‘wets’ have, predictably, come out in support of this new crusade. So we’ve had the likes of Dominic Grieve, David Gauke and Justine Greening welcoming the development as a step towards restoring ‘common sense’ and ‘moderation’ to the party – or something along those lines. Grandees such as Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke have expressed their approval, too. Evidently these people genuinely believe that the initiative will serve as a launchpad for propelling the Conservative party back to office.

It does make one wonder just how detached from reality they are. Do they know nothing of the political and cultural convulsions that have rocked our country in recent times? Did Brexit pass them by? Are they not aware of the seismic realignment that has taken place – is still taking place – in British politics? Do they not know that every opinion poll shows the two big parties holed beneath the waterline and at risk of being supplanted by more radical alternatives? Do they ever trouble to ask themselves why these things came to pass?

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YESTERDAY, I joined presenter Ian Collins on TalkTV to discuss Andy Burnham’s attempted return to parliament and the possibility of his dethroning Sir Keir Starmer.

The segment can be viewed below.

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A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

I’m sure we all remember the fuss during the EU referendum campaign over the suggestion emblazoned on the ‘Vote Leave’ battle bus that the £350m Britain sent to Brussels every week would be better spent on the NHS. How the shrill voices of the Remain campaign went into meltdown over that one. The lies! The deception! The sheer audacity of those ‘post-truth’ Brexiteers seeking to mislead the masses with their false promises!

In the judgement of the chattering classes, that bus had a significant influence on the result. But their judgement was seriously skewed. I was a foot soldier of the Leave campaign and can recall thinking at the time that if these people genuinely believed that millions were going to vote for Brexit because of something they had read on the side of a bus, they really did not understand their own country and had no sense of the anger that had been building inside it over the past couple of decades.

They still haven’t got over it. Even today, the metropolitan elitists see the Brexit vote, and the wicked ‘lies’ of the Leave campaign, as the catalyst for Britain’s turn from being a nation of tolerance and enlightenment to one infected with rampant bigotry and hate.

And that mindset shapes their entire political outlook – in particular their obsession with seeking ever tighter restrictions, whether through the law or social sanction, on what people may say and when they may say it.

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They truly believe that large swathes of voters – especially those from the working classes – are unwitting dupes, people without agency or sufficient intelligence to arrive at their own opinions. These voters are, in their eyes, fodder for the populist right, prey to its falsehoods and ‘disinformation’.

After the referendum campaign, some aggrieved liberal voices made calls for leaders of the Leave campaign to be prosecuted. Others questioned the legitimacy of the democratic process itself, grumbling that if the masses misused the vote in this way then perhaps it would be wiser not to let them have it at all. Then Donald Trump went and got elected across the pond, and they really flipped.

A full decade later, they are still fixated on controlling the public narrative. That’s why they take against any person, outlet or platform that dares to challenge their own narrow worldview. They hate GB News and refuse to appear on it. They loathe Elon Musk’s ‘X’. They sit idle while people are hauled through the courts for saying or writing things which ought never to be regarded as crimes. And their Online Safety Act has, as some of us always feared it would, become something of an Orwellian censorship tool.

The latest authoritarian move comes in the form of a proposal by the Labour government in Wales to make it a criminal offence for a politician to ‘lie’ during an election campaign. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do not want to see politicians making false or misleading statements in the hope of being elected. But how on Earth is such a measure remotely practical? How might it be policed? Who would determine what, in the cut and thrust of a febrile political campaign, constituted a ‘lie’?

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Depressingly, it seems that the idea has caught on, for the Westminster parliament is also set to discuss a similar proposal tabled by Labour MP Luke Myer. Mr Myer wants to make it a crime for members of the Houses of Commons and Lords to deliberately mislead the public.

It seems to me that these proposals have been dreamed up for a single reason – to put the frighteners on any ‘populist’ campaigner with designs on standing for office. Were they to become law, the proposals would have the most chilling effect on public debate, with the likelihood that nonconformist election candidates would constantly be walking on eggshells, scared to say anything radical or unorthodox in case it lands them in a prison cell.

Throughout history politicians have embellished, exaggerated and ‘spun’. It may not be right, but in a free and democratic society it’s almost inevitable. By all means kick them out of office if they fail to honour their pledges. But if we’re going to start prosecuting election candidates every time they overstep the mark on the hustings, we will be driving a coach and horses through political democracy in this country.

The proposals being discussed in Cardiff and Westminster are unworkable and should be ditched. The liberal authoritarians supporting them really need to get used to the fact that Britain is changing, and they are no longer always destined to get their way as they did in the past. Their time would be better spent understanding why that change is happening rather than constantly seeking to silence those attempting to bring it about.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

It comes to something when self-proclaimed British ‘patriots’ stand and applaud a foreign head of state who has launched an economic assault on their country – thereby imperilling the jobs and livelihoods of thousands of their compatriots – simply because he is angry that their government has objected to his plot to annex the territory of a sovereign nation.

Surely nobody who truly loved Britain or believed in the concepts of national sovereignty, borders and a rules-based order would feel the slightest shred of sympathy for Donald Trump’s plan to impose trade tariffs on European nations that won’t play ball with him over Greenland?

But that’s what certain ‘patriotic’ voices are doing. Trust me, I’ve been arguing with some of them on social media over the past couple of days. And their position baffles me.

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that Trump Derangement Syndrome does not afflict only the president’s opponents; some of his most passionate supporters suffer from it, too. There seems to be no line that their hero might ever cross that would persuade them to offer even the mildest criticism of him. In that respect, they are beginning to resemble a cult.

Trump is a man who seems to be rapidly losing the plot. And I say that as someone on the left who never joined in with the hysteria that accompanied his two election victories. Though I am no admirer of the man, I felt that a Trump presidency would at least serve as a welcome antidote to the failed liberal-progressive order that had captured the US and much of the West. And I scoffed when my political allies talked of him as a new Hitler.

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But Trump’s recent conduct on the global stage has been as shameful as it has been erratic. His letter on Monday to the prime minister of Norway - in which he declared that he no longer feels an obligation to think only of peace because ‘your country decided not to give me the Nobel peace prize’ - was bordering on the demented.

And the disrespect he has shown to Denmark is indefensible. That country is a longstanding and dependable ally of the US. When Islamic militants struck on 9/11 and Article 5 of the Nato treaty – the clause providing for collective defence among members – was invoked for the first time, the Danes stepped up. In the ensuing war in Afghanistan, Denmark lost more soldiers per capita than any other coalition force. And Trump thanks the country by attempting to plunder a territory that has been in union with it for over 200 years.

The Trump worshippers talk pompously of how their man is fighting a ‘civilisational’ battle on behalf of the entire West, and that his threat to grab Greenland is justified as part of that effort. But what sort of civilisation are we defending if we allow demagogic leaders of powerful countries to pillage the territories of peaceable allies? Is such behaviour consistent with the values of freedom, democracy and liberty that we purport to cherish?

‘Ah, but if Trump doesn’t take Greenland, the Russians or Chinese will,’ they counter. Oh, really? Does anyone seriously believe that Putin or Xi is going to invade the territory of a Nato member, knowing, as they surely do, that it would spark a world war? At any rate, under an existing treaty, agreed with Denmark in 1951, the US can place as many military facilities on Greenland as it deems necessary. There is no justification whatsoever for the White House’s insistence on ownership of the place.

When someone like the US’s former national security advisor John Bolton, a staunch ‘neocon’ who has supported pretty much every US military intervention in modern times, describes his president’s actions over Greenland as ‘foolish and contrary to fundamental American interests’, you know that Trump has overstepped the mark.

What’s more, the president isn’t even carrying his own voters on the issue, with, according to a recent poll, just 17% of Americans agreeing with his plan to acquire the territory.

I do wonder if the Trump cultists ever stop to ponder how their man is beginning to undermine the very things that apparently matter to them. Take, for example, his approach to Canada. Trump’s belligerent attitude towards their country caused Canadians to return Mark Carney’s Liberal party to power, just at a time when it appeared that the discredited liberal-progressive order in Canada was collapsing. Similarly, Trump’s hostility towards Europe may well have the effect of setting back the national populism currently surging across the continent, and solidifying support for the EU. Is this what they want?

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The cultists might also like to pay a bit of attention to history. When, in 1956, the Kremlin sent Soviet tanks into Hungary to crush a popular uprising against that country’s hardline communist government, it split the international left, including here in Britain. Many leftists saw the aggression by Moscow as inexcusable and denounced it, whereas the hardcore believers (‘tankies’, as they were to become known) defended it as part of the struggle for worldwide socialism. How one was regarded by other activists on the left was, in the years that followed, often determined by what stance one took ‘on Hungary’.

I have a suspicion that Greenland will become the political right’s Hungary. Trump’s aggression has the capacity to split the right asunder and dictate how its activists will be seen in years to come. Do those who profess to believe in national sovereignty and borders – and the right of free countries to defend both – really mean it? Are they as committed to the values of freedom, democracy and liberty as they claim?

Whatever happens in the future, we should never forget where people stood on Greenland, and what they said about it, in the year 2026, when it really mattered.

A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery

An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.

THIS morning, I joined presenter Duncan Barkes on TalkTV to discuss Robert Jenrick’s defection to Reform UK and what it signals for Britain’s increasingly febrile political landscape.

The segment can be viewed below. Enjoy.

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A reminder that you can follow me on ‘X’: @PaulEmbery