Will we still remember them?

The right to protest is neither unlimited nor unqualified

Towering columns

In The Times, Iain Martin believes the protests planned for Remembrance weekend demonstrate Britain’s failure to create its own melting pot.

Few occasions are sacred to the British but Remembrance weekend comes close. So when several hundred thousand Britons decide that the time we set aside for respecting our war dead is a good time to descend on the capital with genocidal chants, it is clear Britain has lost its way. Even accounting for America’s current political problems, anything on a similar scale overshadowing memorial day in the US, or veterans day this Sunday, would be regarded as an unforgivable incursion, a rejection of the things that bind the nation. The Americans rightly would not stand for it. This runs across the political spectrum.

A moderate, Democrat-leaning friend from the US says he is stunned by these marches in London: “Where I’m from, if you disrespect the flag and the nation’s military you’re in trouble. If you don’t like it here why are you even here? You should, as you Brits say, clear off.”

That is very much not where we are in contemporary Britain. Decades of immersion in the relativist mantras of multiculturalism (prioritise group differences over integration — and don’t dare offend anyone) and an insistence on the inviolable right to protest mean that the poor police officers on the ground are being left, by their confused bosses and terrified politicians, to deal with agitators who hate this country.

For The Jewish Chronicle, Alex Carlile argues that the police should summon the will to enforce existing law, not new anti-terror legislation, to tackle crimes.

Hamas is designated as a terrorist organisation and banned in the UK and several other countries (including Australia, Canada, and the USA) In France all pro-Palestinian demonstrations are prohibited as a result of the Hamas pogrom on the 7 October. This means that there are adverse consequences for supporting, or inviting support, for proscribed terrorist organisation.

There is a strong argument for codifying all UK counter-terrorism laws into a single Act of Parliament. It would certainly help the police. However, even without such consolidation, it would be reasonable to expect those who police demonstrations to have read section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000, the statutory backbone supporting all subsequent additions to the law…

…There have been calls for strengthening counter-terrorism law in the current maelstrom of issues and horrible events. Such changes are not necessary. It would be a political decision to react to present circumstances by passing yet more laws. The proposals inevitably would face considerable opposition in both Houses of our parliament, where necessity and proportionality are rightly scrutinised with a legislative toothcomb. I hope that I have illustrated that the existing law is sufficient if used well and wisely.

At War on the Rocks, Leo Blanken, Ian Rice, and Craig Whiteside examine how Hamas has benefitted from the growing capabilities of non-state actors.

Hamas’ surprise attack had two dimensions. The first was “strategic surprise.” This refers to an adversary achieving strategic effects by attacking a known enemy using known methods but catching them unaware “at an unexpected time or place.” For example, the Pearl Harbor attack achieved strategic surprise even though the possibility of Japan using carrier-based aircraft was anticipated as a potential threat. The second dimension of the Hamas attack was “doctrinal surprise.” This refers to an actor employing “known technologies and capabilities in unexpected ways to produce powerful new effects.” Hamas achieved this by combining many elements of what the U.S. military refers to as a multi-domain military operation — and did so with a level of precision, coordination, and planning that shocked observers.

How were the extensive preparations necessary to plan and execute such an attack missed by Israel and others? The essential logic of generating military force is predicated on amassing physical and human capital. Nation-states have performed this task extraordinarily well for the last 1,000 years, and some consider this effort to be the defining activity of states. Other entities, such as multinational corporations, social movements, and extremist groups, by contrast, are commonly believed to face systematic barriers — legal, normative, fiscal, organizational, and human — that prevent them from generating and sustaining such military force. Despite the inherent advantage that nation-states enjoy, however, they are in turn inherently vulnerable to such force. With a fixed geographic footprint, population, infrastructure, and economic base, nations are susceptible to attack in a way that non-state actors generally are not.

Non-state actors use terrorism to leverage state vulnerabilities to achieve political and psychological effects through the application of purposeful violence without the machinery and resourcing associated with conventional military power. This is why so many observers are concerned about terrorist groups acquiring “magic bullet” technology, such as nuclear weapons and strategic cyber effects, or repurposing readily available tech, such as flying commercial airliners into skyscrapers, to scale up their acts of terror.

For The Critic, Derrick Berthelsen sets out how rebalancing the British economy can satisfy the new electoral majority.

For a variety of reasons, economic globalisation is reversing, and I believe this shift will accelerate (and quickly) and be sustained for decades to come. In part it is being driven by the USA’s belated realisation of the military, economic and ideological threat China represents. In part it is also being driven by the Covid lockdown supply chain disruptions that altered businesses’ perception of the true cost of long and uncontrolled supply chains.

But both are simply adding force to a trend which was moving anyway, driven by the changing economics of the cost of production. This has been in part a consequence of rising wages in China and elsewhere, which reduce the cost of labour arbitrage vs the West. But more importantly, it is a consequence of technological advances in AI and robotics, which are fundamentally reducing the labour intensity of production. In short, labour as a cost input is diminishing in importance, and the more it does the more corporate investment models will favour shifting production closer to the consumer.

McKinsey estimates that as much as 25 per cent of global trade will shift within the next decade or so. That’s $4.5 trillion worth of trade (1.5x UK GDP). Already Canada and Mexico have both overtaken China as the USA’s major trading partners…

…For the UK, implementing policies which embrace these trends can do a lot of the heavy lifting of the economic rebalancing that the electoral majority desire. Production will largely return to the geographical areas they left — providing direct investment and jobs, supply chain investment and jobs, and ancillary investment and jobs.

In The Telegraph, Miriam Cates reveals polling that shows women want to have more children but are not given the freedom to choose.

The good news is that the shortage of babies is not due to lack of demand. Exclusive polling commissioned for today’s event shows that 92 per cent of young women want children and that the average number of children desired is 2.4. In other words, if women were able to have the number of children they actually wanted, we wouldn’t have a problem.

But whilst the desire is there, sadly it often goes unfulfilled. Only a tiny minority of the young women in our poll said they don’t want children, yet on current trends one in three will likely never become mothers. This represents a deep personal tragedy for many. Policy makers must seek, as far as possible, to remove the barriers that prevent those who want to have children from doing so.

Our polling gives some indications about where to begin. The most common factor cited for delaying starting a family is the impact on household finances. Although it will take considerable political will to address this, generous tax breaks for families and a radical approach to housing would be a start. Half of young women cited career impact as a reason for delaying children. Legislators and employers should create guarantees for mothers to return to their career at the same level following a break. 

In The Times, Juliet Samuel reflects on the lessons we need to learn from the Covid inquiry, arguing that values as well as models should lead decision-making.

Given our lack of preparation and knowledge, I believe a lockdown of most activity (except schools) was the right thing to do in March 2020. Unfortunately, it set the habit for the second and third waves, even after the personal behaviour of Ferguson, Matt Hancock and Downing Street staffers showed they knew the risk to the vast majority of people was low.

Nonetheless, flawed data, targets and models filled the gap where judgment belonged. A fixation on testing and hospital beds had led to the catastrophe of discharging Covid patients into care homes. A maniacal focus on the virus reproduction rate set the precedent of disastrous school closures. Economic data then fuelled the reopening of pubs before schools. Models, rules-of-thumb, guidance, traffic-light systems, lockdown tiers — all came and went, attempts to show government was “following the science” rather than succumbing to headlines as crisis followed crisis.

The problem with “follow the science” and similarly technocratic approaches to governing is that they prioritise whatever is seen to be measurable at that moment. The problem is made worse by over-reliance on highly speculative models that turn flawed data into even more flawed forecasts.

Wonky thinking

Réka Juhász, Nathan J. Lane & Dani Rodrik have published The New Economics of Industrial Policy. This working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research provides a rigorous overview of the literature that has been produced on evidence of how industrial policy can have a positive impact, including in the East Asian economies.

Industrial policy is much discussed, but rarely explicitly defined. We define industrial policies as those government policies that explicitly target the transformation of the structure of economic activity in pursuit of some public goal. The goal is typically to stimulate innovation, productivity, and economic growth. But it could also be to promote climate transition, good jobs, lagging regions, exports, or import substitution. Since industrial policy targets structural change, a key characteristic is the exercise of choice and discretion by the public authorities: “we promote X but not Y,” though the later part of this statement is typically left implicit.

Industrial policy has traditionally focused on promoting manufacturing industries such as steel, autos, shipbuilding, aircraft, or semiconductors – hence the name. But our definition is open-ended and includes support for services as well as particular types of R&D. Hence industrial policies overlap with what in other contexts might be called regional policies (Slatery and Zidar, 2020), place-based policies (Neumark and Simpson, 2015), or innovation policies (Mazzucato, 2014). In developing countries, industrial policies are often called productive development policies (Fernández-Arias et al., 2016) or structural transformation policies – in part because of the negative connotation the term “industrial policy” has acquired, but also to reflect the reality that similar policies have to be deployed for a wider array of developmental challenges going beyond industrialization.

Industrial policies can take various forms but always create incentives for private-sector actors – firms, innovators, investors – to act in ways that are consistent with the intended direction of structural change. Subsidies (on specific types of exports, investment, R&D, etc.) are the most obvious types of industrial policy. But the gamut runs from import protection to exemptions from specific regulations to public provision of key inputs such as land or training.

Since government attention is a scarce good, public-private collaboration focused on alleviating constraints faced by specific sectors or groups of firms, such as deliberate on councils or business-government roundtables, also counts as industrial policy. Since industrial policy, by design, favors certain types of economic behavior, it typically comes with some kind of conditionality. Conditionality can be of a limited kind, restricted to ex-ante eligibility criteria. For example, only firms with less than a certain number of employees in a particular sector or region might be able to receive the proffered subsidy. Alternatively, the incentives may be conditioned on ex-post behavioral changes, such as undertaking specific investment or eventually employing a target number of workers. In the later case, there might be explicit, quantitative performance criteria or a softer, iterative form of monitoring to ensure broad compliance.

In the Wall Street Journal, Ed Hussain explains that Hamas is not only a terrorist political organisation but a religious movement grounded in fundamentalist Islamic theology. Its objective is to cleanse the Levant of Jews and create a regionwide Shariah state, he argues.

Hamas isn’t only a terrorist group, and it isn’t a Palestinian nationalist movement. It is a religious organization, incubated by the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, founded in 1928, departed from Islamic tradition and created Islamism, a totalitarian ideology to resist the pluralist West.

Its worldview, as French political scientist Gilles Kepel has documented, arose in the same intellectual firmament as German Nazism and Italian fascism. The Brotherhood developed a new declaration of faith for its members: “God is our objective. The Prophet is our political leader. The Quran is our constitution. Jihad is our method. Martyrdom is our aspiration.” No Muslim before the 20th century would have belittled his faith’s sacred text by regarding it as a political manifesto.

When Ahmed Yassin left Al-Azhar University in Cairo and founded Hamas in Gaza in 1987, the group’s members placed their hands on the Quran and declared: “I promise to be a good Muslim in defending Islam and the lost land of Palestine.” Theology is central to Hamas’s charter, which declares that “Islam will destroy Israel” and that because “Palestine is an Islamic land,” it is the “individual duty of every Muslim” to liberate it. Hamas calls “the land of Palestine” a waqf, an Islamic endowment. These teachings would have been alien to Muslims who coexisted with Jews for 12 centuries.

Hamas envisages a future Palestine that is judenrein, or cleansed of Jews. Article 7 of its charter declares: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’” That animus stems in part from its considering the Jews to be European colonialists, ignoring that they’re native to the land and that Islamic armies successfully colonized the Levant. Christians, whom Hamas view as part of the local Arab population, are treated less violently, but they don’t enjoy unfettered religious liberty.

Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahhar has said that Palestine is only a “toothbrush in our pocket.” Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood aspire to create a regionwide Shariah state, a more anti-Western confrontational caliphate in line with Iran’s political model than that of moderate Arab nations in the neighbourhood. That intention has led several Arab nations—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt—to ban both groups from organizing within their borders. In 1979 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed a peace agreement with Israel. Two years later Islamists assassinated him.

Hamas’s theology justifies its terrorism. “The so-called peace process is futile,” Hamas leader Khaled Mashal said in 2015. “There is no peace. Only the path of jihad, sacrifice and blood.” Hamas calls its terror faction the al-Qassam Brigades, after the Syrian cleric Izzaddin al-Qassam, who attacked Jews living in kibbutzim in the 1930s. On Oct. 7, the brigade killed more than 1,400 in southern Israel in an orgy of bestial violence. Britain eliminated Izzaddin al-Qassam in 1935, and Israel will kill Hamas fighters today. Yet both are known as criminals and murderers only to the sane and sensible. To Hamas and its flock, the terrorists are known as martyrs and believed to live in heaven.

Book of the week

We recommend Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West by Doug Stokes. The author investigates the developments that have emerged from the fallout of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and the role of universities in deconstructing Western narratives and institutions.

“The relatively benign conditions enjoyed in the post-war Western world are not the historical norm. In an era structurally predisposed to a greater need for national cohesion and purpose in the face of coming challenges, the call for national abasement will undoubtedly face a political reckoning. As we see an increased bifurcation in the global economy and shifts in power away from the West to a dynamic East Asia, the Western political economy will suffer further severe dislocations. We will likely face the greater threat of interstate war as the world economy decouples. As we shift from an era of US unipolarity and global economic growth, hard questions that will likely often require hard answers will be engendered by the struggle over resources and a return of great power politics. To help carry us through, it is almost beyond comprehension that British institutions would continue to peddle a worldview based on the denigration of British history and, thus civilisational purpose. The continued endorsement of a divisive form of collective racial guilt by what are privileged elites and relatively tiny minorities of self-interested activists is an indulgent dalliance in the context of Western decline.

There are many dangers in the woke experiment. The Enlightenment idea was based in the belief that authority is grounded in humanity’s shared rationality, with a common culture accessible in principle to every citizen and capable of articulation. However, technocratic progressivism requires the disqualification of experience and common sense to guide reality. In that, we are now closer to the Enlightenment’s caricature of a medieval society of a priestly form of authority based on the presumption of inner guilt, a telos of unallayed grievance and the importance of emotion and lived experience over that which is real. Logic and reason are not tools of white supremacy, but instead, a via media that allowed humans to escape the friend-enemy distinction common to politics; they are the foundations upon which we build together.

As economic power shifts to the East coupled with a steep rise in mass legal and illegal migration to the U.K, the deal being offered seems to be that British citizens must now compete with the world's richest on the housing market and the world's poorest on the labour market within the context of crumbling services. Any criticism of these transformations is often labelled as racist and not allowed to be debated or is justified as wholly positive by cheerleaders for these profound social transformations, often as a form of karmic payback for the injustices of the British Empire.”

Quick links

The Home Secretary condemned bias in the Metropolitan Police’s handling of pro-Palestine demonstrations.

One fifth of voters sympathise with Israel and one-fifth with Palestine, while 31% sympathise with both sides equally, according to YouGov…

…but 37% of Gen Z (18-24 year olds) side with Palestine and 13% with Israel.

Remainers are more likely than Leavers to side with Palestine over Israel by 24% to 9%.

Anti-Israel protesters in Germany demanded a caliphate while bearing the black flag of Islamic State.

Despite improved OBR fiscal forecasts, departmental spending power could be cut by 16% between 2022-23 and 2027-28 instead of the 11% predicted back in March.

UK business investment fell 4.2% in July-September 2023, but is up 2.8% on this time last year.

Germany followed Britain’s example in considering asylum-processing abroad…

…while German spending on refugees increased from around Є42 billion to around Є50 billion this year.

China has built enough auto factories to make every car sold in China, Europe, and the United States.

The EU is set to impose a carbon border tax in 2026 with major implications for British steel and energy sectors.

Non-EU international students are less likely to attain top grades from UK universities.

Over 100 academics formed the London Universities’ Council for Academic Freedom to “fight cancel culture” on campus.

All four ONS measures of personal well-being have fallen to 2021 levels.

More than half of offenders with at least 45 prior convictions do not go to jail.

Analysis suggests there is no correlation between the size of an MP’s majority and their views on economic policy.

773 African civilians have been massacred by Jihadists in West Darfur.

The Prime Minister of Somalia called Hamas “a righteous Islamic liberation movement”.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis won the third Republican primary debate according to 56% of Republican voters.