A reasonable, well-informed person would likely conclude that this has something to do with the fact that Ukraine has spent the past year methodically striking Russian refineries — the single most effective thing it has done to degrade Moscow’s ability to fund the war. According to estimates anywhere between 20% and 50% of Russian refining capacity is currently offline, with Russia banning diesel exports earlier this year. The Kremlin was, by its own account, in its worst energy crisis since the 1990s.

Against this backdrop, the narrative the Trump Administration and its media mouthpieces have been pumping out for days is that with global diesel shortages and spiralling prices, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had to be restrained in order to save the global economy.

According to the Financial Times, CNN and the Kyiv Independent, the Administration warned it would suspend intelligence sharing and shut down PURL — the NATO mechanism through which European allies buy American weapons for Ukraine — unless Ukraine stops hitting Russian oil infrastructure. “They called all the top military officials with threats,” one Ukrainian official told the Kyiv Independent.

And they weren’t empty threats either.

On Tuesday night, Ukraine’s Starlink terminals started failing. SpaceX had imposed a speed cap on Starshield — the military-grade service — cutting connectivity whenever a terminal moves faster than about 100mph. What moves faster than 100mph and needs an internet connection? A Ukrainian long-range strike drone.

According to Zelensky’s defence technology adviser, Starlink is Ukraine’s most effective tool for intercepting incoming Russian jet-powered drones — and for the second time in a week, Ukraine received no advance warning of a Russian ballistic missile attack.

Elon Musk’s initial explanation was that Starlink “cannot be used for offensive military action, as doing so would be inappropriate for a commercial company,” later clarifying that any limits on speed or usage “are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” Service was partially restored on Wednesday. The speed cap remains.

“Effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE,” Trump posted on Sunday. “It was news for me,” Zelensky told Axios. More importantly, it appears to have been news for Vladimir Putin: Russia struck Ukrainian energy infrastructure hours later, including a power plant.

Is this undermining of Ukraine’s war effort at precisely the moment it is making progress worth it? Let’s look at the facts.

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The 300,000 metric tons Russia has promised to supply this month is 0.26% of global monthly demand. Even if Putin delivers the full million tons in December (which he won’t), we are talking about less than 1% of monthly diesel consumption.

The energy ceasefire isn’t about Ukraine, Zelensky or even Russia. It’s about deflecting blame for the disastrous impact of the Iran war on the global economy.

By most estimates, the hole in the diesel market sits somewhere in the region of 5.4 million tons a month — roughly what has been removed by the collapse of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

The politics explain everything. Trump’s approval has collapsed to an average of around 36%, with Reuters/Ipsos recording an all-time low of 32%. More alarming for Republicans: his approval among his own voters has fallen from 82% to 73% in a single week. Republican approval of his handling of the economy is down 24 points since January. On cost of living, down 26.

Gas is near $4.50 a gallon across the US. Diesel is above $6, and in California it’s hit $8. Nate Silver’s generic ballot average has Democrats at +8.9 — wider than the 2018 blue wave that cost Trump the House. Voters trust Democrats over Republicans on gas prices by 40 to 27. Fox News, hardly a hostile source, has shifted twenty House races towards the Democrats in a single week, citing fuel and grocery prices, and notes that Kentucky, Ohio and Texas are in the top five states for diesel increases.

This is a cynical attempt to throw someone else to the electoral lions. It won’t work, of course, because everyone but the most hardcore Trump loyalists understands which war has caused all this. After all, the Ukraine war has gone on for nearly 5 years, while the fuel and fertiliser shortages have happened this year and seem to be directly correlated with the start of the war in Iran.

Trump and his allies knew the Iran war would be a problem come the mid-terms when they started it: Ted Cruz told us as much when we interviewed him in March:

“If [the Iran war] extends to November we’ve done something wildly wrong,” he said.

He was right on that, despite the fact that he was convinced it wouldn’t actually happen. In the end, the war has dragged on and is widely perceived to have been a costly mistake. That’s the real reason Trump is now trying to shift the blame onto Ukraine.

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I take a different view. To me, wokeness is a pathology of human beings that is reflected not in the views people hold but in the behaviour its adherents feel entitled to engage in.

Most people have been implicitly taught to think of the political spectrum as a line with communism on the far left and fascism on the far right. Horseshoe theory, on the other hand, sees these far ends of the spectrum bending towards each other and meeting as they reach for the same methods. We saw this in the 1930s when the hostility to and active destruction of democracy, suppression of criticism, scapegoating and extermination of outgroups, socialist economics, militarism and so on were prevalent both in the communist world and in the fascist countries of Europe and beyond.

The horseshoe theory of wokeness is no different. The ideology which is parodied as “gay race communism” is different from the post-liberal right but the methodology is similar. Identitarian victimhood, a belief in the fundamental immorality and irredeemability of their political opponents and a general black & white thinking about everything, including war, history and politics.

The woke left’s approach to history is simple: imagine a perfect world. Now look at people who lived two hundred years ago and notice that they did not live in it. Conclude that they were monsters. Tear down their statues.

And what about the woke right’s approach? Imagine a perfect world. Now look at people who were making impossible decisions before and during WW2 and notice that both the process and the outcome were not perfect either. Conclude they too were monsters and invert the moral order. This is how you get to the “Churchill was the greatest villain of WW2” rhetoric and what is that if not the metaphorical tearing down of his statue?

“Killing innocent people is always wrong,” Tucker emotes. And, of course, in a utopian vacuum, we’d all agree with him because it’s superficially true and important. Proportionality, discrimination, the whole apparatus of just war theory exists precisely because we take it seriously. But as a moral position about the Second World War, it is not profound. It’s childish.

Because the Second World War was a mass slaughter of civilians. That was its defining characteristic. The Axis powers murdered civilians on an industrial scale, as policy, continuously, until the moment they were physically prevented from continuing. Six million Jews. Millions of Slavs. And that’s just Hitler’s Germany. Japan had been in Manchuria since 1931 and at full-scale war with China since 1937. By the time Hitler invaded Poland, millions of Chinese civilians were already dead, with much of the killing done in close quarters and by hand: beheaded with swords, burned or buried alive, used for bayonet practice.

So the actual question — the one any serious person has to answer — is not “is killing innocents wrong?” It’s this: given that the mass killing of innocents is already happening, at vast scale, every single day, are you willing to use force to stop it, knowing that doing so will kill enemy combatants and civilians too but in far smaller numbers?

When moral perfection is the standard, Carlson’s whataboutism almost works. In fact, it seems to work on millions of people who want simple explanations for complex problems.

“Look over here,” says Tucker - “Britain locked up political opponents and their wives during the war, how undemocratic”. To disrupt the framing of “Churchill good, Nazis bad”, Britain did X-Less-Than-Perfect-Thing is close to compelling. Less so when you know the facts.

The person he is talking about is Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. Mosley was interned in May 1940, with the invasion expected within weeks; he had married Diana Mitford at Goebbels’ house with Hitler as a guest; Diana had met Hitler repeatedly and was lobbying for a pro-Nazi radio station. He was released in 1943, on health grounds despite a public outcry and lived on until his death in 1980. Such tyranny!

Next, Carlson explains that Hitler never wanted war with Britain. After all, he said so! And if you can’t trust Adolf Hitler who can you trust?

Seriously though, ask yourself: is this a coherent position for someone who has built a career on being suspicious of powerful elites? Would Tucker accept this line of argument regarding Joe Biden, or Anthony Fauci, or even Donald Trump?

We know exactly what Hitler wanted.

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If you’ve spent the last decade listening to British politicians deliver focus-grouped slurry, you could be forgiven for being swept away with the enthusiasm. The man can communicate. It would be easy and satisfying to dismiss the excitement his speech has generated by reducing it to “Our Andy” being good at PR, but let’s be honest: Burnham is not succeeding because the public has been hoodwinked. He is succeeding because he is giving the people what they want.

Many on the right like to pretend that Britain is a nation of frustrated Thatcherites straining against a socialist establishment. And sure, if you poll the British people in the abstract, support for higher taxes and spending has actually fallen — it’s at its lowest since 2013. But ask about anything specific and the picture inverts. 72% want higher taxes on the top 5%. 61% will pay more themselves for the NHS. 82% want water nationalised, 76% the railways — including 78% and 66% of Reform voters respectively. The British public is against tax and spend in general and in favour of it in every particular, which is the single most useful fact in British politics if you happen to be Andy Burnham. He is simply the first politician with the emotional range to leverage this without sounding like he’s reading a spreadsheet.

So he will get his way. And it will not work.

It will not work because Britain does not have a distribution problem. It has a production problem. We already have the highest tax burden in post-war history at 36% of GDP and the OBR expects it to hit 38% by 2030-31. We are not a low-tax country that has been starving the state.

The top 1% of income taxpayers earn around 13% of all income and pay 29% of all income tax. The top 10% pay roughly 60% of it. Those figures have risen sharply — in 1999/2000 the top 1% paid 21% and the top 10% paid 50%. The British tax system has become steadily more progressive over twenty-five years, not less. Whatever has gone wrong, “the rich not paying their fair share” is not it.

Our GDP per capita is lower today than it was in 2007. We are poorer than Germany, Australia, America, Singapore and Switzerland, and we are being caught by Poland. You cannot redistribute your way out of this any more than you can drink your way out of a hangover.

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Meanwhile the arithmetic is getting worse on its own. We have an ageing population and a birthrate of around 1.4 children per woman, well below replacement. Every year, more people draw on the state and fewer people fund it. To his credit, Burnham has grasped at least half of this — ending the triple lock from 2030 is the first honest thing a Prime Minister has said about pensions in fifteen years, and he deserves credit for saying it to a Labour conference rather than to a think tank. But he is using that money to fund consumption, not production. He is reshuffling the deck, not printing more cards.

There is precisely one way out of the demographic trap, and it is productivity. Fewer workers producing dramatically more value per hour. That requires cheap energy, aggressive adoption of technology, and an economy in which work pays and the people who could be working actually are.

Now look at what we’re doing instead. We have the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world because of Net Zero targets nobody can afford and nobody voted for. Instead of looking to the US which is steaming ahead to win the AI race, we follow the European model where we regulate AI before we have any AI worth regulating. And most damning of all: there are a million young Brits aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training. Fifty-eight per cent of them have never had a paid job.

And how have we responded to this? By importing millions of people to do the work, and paying our own young people to stay at home and rot. We have built a system in which a young British man is the problem and a young foreign man is the solution.

The decisions that led to this were rational: the employer who needed a shift covered this month, not a trainee next year; the Treasury official who scored an immediate taxpayer against a deferred return; the minister who had a shortage to fix before the figures came out. Add up thirty years of “reasonable” short term thinking and you arrive at a country that imports its workforce and warehouses its young.

So Burnham will spend. Taxes will rise, growth will continue to stagnate, the debt will spiral out of control and the whole thing will end in the kind of humiliation that lingers in the national memory for a generation.

I don’t want this to happen. It will be terrible. But I have resigned myself to the conclusion that it is the only way to save this country in the long run.

Because there is no argument that will break Britain and Europe out of the ideology we are trapped in. I have made the arguments. Many better people have made them better. It changes nothing, because the belief that prosperity is something you allocate rather than something you create is not a proposition — it is a faith, and faiths are not refuted by evidence. They are refuted by failure.

Someone has to run the experiment to its conclusion. Andy Burnham has volunteered. He may well be the most useful Prime Minister of my lifetime — just not in the way he intends.

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“Less anger-inducing, but stranger still,” he writes, “was a debate that kicked off after I left office about whether I was English or not. The claim was that I couldn’t be because I was a ‘brown Hindu’.”

That was me. In February last year, on Triggernometry, Fraser Nelson raised Sunak unprompted in a debate about identity and told me he was “as English as Tizer and y-fronts.” I made a nuanced counter-argument, but in the ensuing cross-talk I said: “He’s a brown Hindu. How is he English?”

This was not the best articulation of an argument which Nelson himself described as “perfectly fair point” in the aftermath. What I meant to use was the phrase nobody objects to when the BBC uses it — British Asian — and I reached for a shortcut that obscured the argument rather than sharpening it. That one’s on me, and I’ve said so before.

I typically don’t go around issuing verdicts on whether people are English. I was answering a claim that had been put to me, about a man I have never met and bear no ill will towards, on a podcast where my job is to respond to what my guest says. I’d have preferred the argument stayed general rather than focusing on Sunak. It didn’t, and he’s had a year of being the case study, which I regret. I texted him privately to say so. No reply - I don’t know if the number I was given for him is no longer in use or he simply doesn’t want to accept my apology. If it’s the latter, that is, of course, his right.

That’s the concession. Here’s the part I won’t concede.

The charge that followed was not that I phrased it badly. It was that my position was racist.

I have two children. Both were born in England to British parents who each came here from somewhere else. They are not English either. They’re British. I said this in the very same podcast Sunak pulls quotes from in his article.

My kids also happen to be whiter than a Michael Buble Christmas album. So either I’m a racist against my own white children, or this isn’t an argument about race.

Suella Braverman, Sunak’s own former Home Secretary, responded to the row about my comments by penning an article in which she argued that as a proud British Asian she herself is not English. Is she racist against herself or is there perhaps more of a substantive discussion being had than people would like to pretend?

It’s 2026, of course, so to many people everything is about race but instead of having the stupid version of this debate, let’s take Sunak’s argument and address it on its merits. Let’s accept that anyone can be English. All that is required is to be born in England and to say you’re English. Feels good, doesn’t it? If you’re an ethnic minority like Sunak or an immigrant like me, just saying this coats you in the comforting protection of fitting in, being safe and living in a land of beautiful diversity.

And if you’re a white Brit who says this, what a relief it is to know that you’re definitely not a nasty racist.

To his credit, despite repeatedly and deliberately conflating Englishness with Britishness at his convenience, Sunak is an intelligent man who can’t pretend he doesn’t actually understand the argument:

“Some people will argue that English is an ethnic identity and British a civic identity. Though if you think those nuances are heard by most people, I fear you are being rather — perhaps even wilfully — naive,” he says. “If you are born and brought up in England and view it as home, what are you other than English? Attempting to deny people their Englishness or Britishness because of the colour of their skin is a recipe for alienation, for a two-tier society. How are children who hear this meant to feel?”

If I was at any point naive about people’s ability to hear the nuance of this debate, I have certainly been disabused of my delusions by the backlash to my comments. The problem for Sunak, however, and, more importantly, for our country, is that just because a lot of people are too busy, too scared or too uninterested to understand the problem does not mean the problem will magically disappear.

Would Sunak argue that the majority of the British public are currently willing to hear the nuances of the national debt (which is greater than our GDP), or that raising taxes will not deliver prosperity for the very people that measure is alleged to help? I doubt it.

That many are unable to parse the complexities of a particular issue does not render that issue irrelevant. What Sunak actually wants is for us to accept that this debate is pointless, not because it doesn’t matter, but because he is right. As he says in the opening of his article, “In Britain, we’ve created the world’s most successful multi-faith, multi-ethnic democracy.” Job done, case closed.

Unfortunately for all of us, the reason we are having this debate is that to a large and growing number of people in Britain this multicultural experiment doesn’t feel all that successful. Indeed, the failure of multiculturalism has become so undeniable that we’ve given up cancelling people who make this point.

In her brilliant, upcoming book “Diversity is Not Our Strength”, Katharine Birbalsingh, an inner-city teacher and founder of the Michaela school, whose life’s work has been to inculcate a largely ethnic minority intake of students into uniting around their British identity, chronicles the rising self-segregation among children across schools which fail to do this.

“The inner city scene I have described is, in the long run, more divisive than is understood. I have seen it all before. The Bengali kids sit together. The Pakistani kids sit on the other side of the hall. The Hindu Indian kids sit together. The Black African kids sit together, sometimes divided on the basis of whether they are Christian or Muslim. The Eastern European kids have their area outside by a set group of benches. At other moments, friendships across divides will be formed but there’s a catch: they will be bound together by the idea that they all experience marginalisation or are all from somewhere else.”

Last year, a 12-year-old girl turned up for Culture Celebration Day prepared to give a short speech about her culture, just like all the other pupils. The event was dedicated to “recognising and celebrating the rich cultural diversity within our school community”.

“We encourage students to consider wearing attire that reflects their nationality or family heritage,” the school said.

Unfortunately for the girl in question, the culture she wanted to talk about was British and the flag on her dress was the Union Jack. As will surprise no one who has been paying attention, far from being included in her school’s delightful celebrations, she was prevented from speaking and sent home. Diversity, it turns out, is not for everyone - some groups are more equal than others.

This phenomenon in Britain’s schools is replicating across society at large, where the endless celebrations of “diversity”, combined with outright hostility towards English and increasingly British identity, history and culture, are creating an equal and opposite reaction.

For many years now, a small number of sensible people have warned that identity politics for minorities would inevitably lead to identity politics for the majority. If you spend 20 years telling people that what matters about them is not what unites them (allegiance and affinity to the country in which they all live) but what makes them different (their ethnicity), then, inevitably, everyone will want a piece of the action. That’s just human nature.

Add to this the unprecedented demographic change that has occurred in this country in recent decades, whereby Britain went from being a white British country with a small number of well-integrated ethnic minority residents, to white British people now being a minority in several of its major cities including its capital.

Why would we be surprised that there is now a debate about identity?

Words are, by their very nature, exclusive rather than inclusive. To describe something as a table is to necessarily claim that it is not a chair. That does not mean that all tables are identical, that a random member of the public can reliably explain what makes a table a table, or even that you cannot eat off a chair the way you might eat off a table or sit on a table the way you might sit on a chair. But we all accept there’s difference between tables and chairs. To say that something is A is to simultaneously make the claim that it is not B.

Sunak’s argument is that we should reject the idea that there is anything exclusive about the English identity. Anyone can be English if they feel they are and were born here. Erling Haaland, born in Leeds, would become English tomorrow simply by saying that he feels English. Given England’s performance against Argentina, many would be forgiven for hoping he does.

But those who adopt this instrumental view of identity like Sunak do not seem to realise that they are playing directly into the hands of the ethnonationalist right. When he says that “attempting to deny people their Englishness … is a recipe for alienation, for a two-tier society”, does he imagine that denying people belonging to a unique and special group only has a negative effect on ethnic minorities? Does he really think that saying to ethnically English people that they are the only people in human history who are not allowed to have an ethnic identity of their own will not make them feel like they live in a two-tier society?

Like Sunak, I do not have any great desire to engage in these debates. I would very much like to return to the Britain to which I came in 1995 - one in which foreigners like me were welcomed as guests in manageable numbers, encouraged to integrate and become British and these debates were not had because they were not necessary. But 30 years of uncontrolled mass immigration, the frankly outrageous opening of our borders to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants with no legitimate claim to be here and the pernicious ideology of diversity and inclusion being rammed down British people’s throats have put an end to that.

I am aware that carefully crafted polling will show that a significant proportion of people in Britain disagree with me. If asked whether a well-known and well-liked British citizen of minority ethnic origin is “English”, many will say that he is. But I wonder how many people would agree that an England populated exclusively by people whose parents were born abroad, no matter how integrated, is England as they think of it.

This entire thing is a trap that is destined to lead Britain down the path to segregation, tribalism and civil strife. There is only one way out because there is only one type of “successful multi-faith, multi-ethnic societies” in history.

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Don’t get me wrong, this cultural moment is not without its entertainment. This week, the lols were furnished by ICE who arrested and deported online “provocateur” Milo Yiannopoulos. “Provocateur” is French for someone who has made being an arsehole into a lucrative career. Don’t get me wrong: he’s undeniably a funny man. For example, last year he tweeted:

“What is the etiquette if you are going about your business and find yourself observing an ICE raid? I want to show a little respect and decency. Are you allowed to masturbate where you stand, in the street, or should you find some kind of awning or motor vehicle?”

Despite previously quipping that he would never move back to Britain because he “doesn’t speak Arabic”, this week he found himself on Piers Morgan’s show, chronicling the “brutality” of his deportation, confessing his shame at supporting President Trump and crying about the dehumanising treatment at the hands of ICE (for whom he’s previously advocated complete immunity). How could anyone with a conscience and a sense of humour not find this entire episode deeply amusing?

Milo, incidentally, is a very good example of the broader trend which it is the purpose of this article to describe. Ten years ago, he was a bright, edgy commentator who said provocative things about matters that were serious and important. He appeared on prominent podcasts like the Rubin Report and the Joe Rogan Experience to talk about the meaning of conservatism, censorship, the cultural vandalism of the progressive left, radical feminism, mass immigration and the rise of Donald Trump. You didn’t have to agree with all of his views to recognise that the issues he was talking about were significant and his acerbic quips were a way to shake his listeners out of the straitjacket of political correctness. He was part of a bigger conversation led by people like Jordan Peterson, Bret and Eric Weinstein, Sam Harris, Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro and others.

Those were the big voices of the online centre and centre right who were breaking open the Overton Window imposed on reasonable people by the legacy media. They debated God, atheism, meaning, the decline of the West and its institutions and the future of our civilisation.

Who are the big voices of the online right today? And what are they debating? Here is forensic investigator Candace Owens debating whether Israel and/or the French Foreign Legion killed Charlie Kirk with the connivance of Erika Kirk. Here’s a debate about the future of MAGA with respected political commentator Alex Jones.

This stuff is inevitably popular because these people know exactly what they’re doing. Think back to that Milo joke about not wanting to move back to Britain because he doesn’t speak Arabic. The joke works because you get the idea: Britain has been overrun by Muslims. There’s only one problem: the overwhelming majority of British Muslims don’t speak Arabic. They’re not from the Arab world, they’re from Pakistan, India, Somalia, Turkey and Bangladesh. Milo is smart enough to know this but he’s also smart enough to know that the people to whom he is pandering do not. This is the essence of slopulism: smart people saying dumb things to profit from the ignorance of the baying mob.

Case in point: the entire online right has spent the last month screeching about the Lindsay Clancy story.

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It was subsequently confirmed that the real number was over 60,000. Obviously, this is not a problem because diversity is our greatest strength but it has allowed the far right to weaponise the issue of irregular migration. Some of the language used in relation to this incident has been completely unacceptable: terms such as “invasion”, which accurately describe what you saw with your own eyes, are offensive and hurtful.

In view of these concerns, we have compiled a list of fact-checks to address misinformation being spread by nefarious online actors:

False Claim: “The borders of Spain were breached by 60,000 illegal immigrants”

This claim is false because the city of Ceuta is not located in mainland Spain. As people who have received the correct progressive education will be aware, if a piece of land is not attached to your country, it’s not really your country. Pearl Harbor, for example, is not American and the Isle of Wight is not British due to there being some water between them and the mother country.

False Claim: “60,000 illegal immigrants coming into the country in a single day is unacceptable”

This claim is false. It’s true that 60,000 illegal immigrants breached the Spanish border in a single day but a lot of them have now left. Think about it like this: if 60,000 men enter your house without your consent and then most of them leave, is it really trespassing?

False Claim: “They are economic migrants, not asylum seekers”

This claim is false. Yes, when asked why they were coming the migrants explained that they want to get money and welfare but that is because they haven’t yet been coached by do-gooding immigration lawyers to claim that they are gender-queer LGBTQ activists fleeing persecution. Many are also fleeing the climate crisis which is why they’ve gone from North Africa to North Africa where the climate is much better.

False Claim: “These illegal immigrants will travel to other European countries”

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Much of the response to the movie has been expressed in explicitly political terms which seems to me to say a lot more about the times we live in than the movie itself.

Sure, having a small, frail-looking transman play the role of a warrior doesn’t look credible on paper but this is negated by both the role in the story and the fact that we are, mercifully, spared a violation of our voluntary suspension of disbelief by the fact that Page’s character does not go around destroying Trojan warriors by the dozen with the viciousness only artificial testosterone can deliver. Nor are we taken out of the story to be “educated” about how the ancient Greeks really were dogmatic about the idea that “trans men are men”. Page just plays a minor male part well. That’s it.

The same is not quite true of Nyong’o because rather than playing the roles with respect to the source material, the casting of a black actress as Helen is undeniably evidence of the modern fashion for sacrificing historic immersion for the sake of diversity. Pointing this out is widely regarded as evidence of some sort of prejudice whereas, in my humble opinion, if you are remotely historically educated about the periods of time and civilisations in question, it is impossible not to be distracted by it: I can well remember going to see the Lempicka musical in New York — which I loved and wrote about here — and finding it difficult to immerse myself in scenes about the Russian Revolution, through which my ancestors lived, performed by what looked like the cast of NWA. I shouldn’t complain, really, as my local friend pointed out: “you should be grateful that Lenin’s murdering, raping and pillaging communist goons weren’t portrayed as the good guys!”

But while the characters of Helen and Clytemnestra are important, they are also minor. And they stand out precisely because the rest of the film looks like ancient Greece. It feels more like a creative quirk than yet another example of diversity being rammed down your throat. It helps that, as with Page, Nyong’o’s performance is solid and convincing.

The one criticism that can be made here is that Clytemnestra is for some reason portrayed as Helen’s twin, as big a travesty as Peter Jackson’s inexcusable decision to ruin the character of Faramir in the Lord of the Rings movie adaptation.

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Before the age of Youtube and social media, political and media opponents didn’t have the option of shit-talking each other from the safety of podcast studios. They had to sit across from each other in TV green rooms and then sit together in one room and at least pretend to be talking to each other.

Having done a fair bit of media in my time, I can tell you that meeting the people you’re about to debate in the green room beforehand is an important part of the process. It might be that the extent of what you can discuss without an argument erupting is limited to the weather because it’s 2026 and we can’t seem to agree on what a woman is. But still, you are forced to be civil.

The effect of this you know from your own experience: the way you react to someone accidentally cutting you up in traffic is far less restrained than your response to someone accidentally bumping into you in the street. The action is the same but the level of offence both taken and expressed is not. Why?

Reassured by the physical distance and feeling of safety it provides, we feel comfortable to engage in more confrontational behaviour.

This difference has been recorded in study after study.

Not that you need a study to understand this. The great American philosopher and former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson said it best when he said:

“Social media made y’all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face.”

This is why when I’ve had disagreements with other people I’ve always tried to engage with them in person. We did this with Jimmy the Giant, a new Left content creator who made a video calling me a “grifter” and eventually apologised and took it down after we had a robust discussion in our studio. We did this with Dave Smith over Israel. With Peter Hitchens over Ukraine. We just did it in a blockbuster upcoming interview with Tony Blair’s former spokesman Alastair Campbell.

I always try to criticise people’s ideas, not them personally, because I know that physical separation is corrosive to public debate. Not only do we feel safe and far from the people with whom we disagree but there is now a giant audience which is not in the room who are watching all the drama. Drama, remember, is, above all, a performance. And in today’s world, you don’t have to play to the audience, you just have to play to your audience. And your audience doesn’t want you to self-moderate. They want you to ramp it up to 11.

A significant portion of the content creator space has realised this which is why we are living in the age of the character. Andrew Tate is the “heel”, a well known character in combat sports from which he hails. Candace Owens is the “entertaining conspiracy loon” character. And Gary Stevenson is the “articulate and courageous champion of the downtrodden” character.

It’s important not to confuse actual articulate and courageous champions of the downtrodden with the characters.

You can help poor people and you can want to help poor people. They are not the same.

The problem with Gary Stevenson is not him as a person. I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice guy. It’s just that he doesn’t understand basic economic concepts. Daniel Priestley once spent several minutes trying (and failing) to get Gary to understand the difference between assets and income. This clip is really worth listening to in full even though it feels dry and technical. Just watch Gary's brain short-circuit repeatedly as he — ironically — complains about how much tax he paid when he was making millions as a Citigroup trader.

Winston Churchill famously described his political opponents as “modest men with much to be modest about”. Gary has no such problem: what he lacks in expertise he more than makes up in the complete absence of modesty. He was, after all, “the best trader in the world” according to one Gary Stevenson. A recent article in the FT suggests that, to put it mildly, some of his colleagues didn’t quite see it that way.

Gary has now moved on from his success in the world of finance to being “one of the world's leading experts on inequality”, a title given to him by, well, himself. He appears to have confused his online fame with knowing things. But Gary is a political campaigner, not an expert. He’s the Greta Thunberg of tax.

There’s no denying he has built up a large audience. That makes him an expert in one thing and one thing only: building up a large audience. And it’s true, you can build up a large audience by making good arguments about important issues and offering genuine insight. But you can also do it by pandering to people’s anger and economic illiteracy.

In the words of the great American economist, Thomas Sowell:

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear”.

Gary has done fantastically well out of advocating policies that would make this country poorer on the basis of false claims about the source of the problem he so passionately wants to address.

This was described in extensive detail in a well-referenced post by tax expert Dan Neidle who appeared in Gary’s recent documentary. Neidle sums up his breakdown by saying:

”Gary Stevenson clearly cares deeply about inequality, and passionately wants a wealth tax. But he is uninterested in the detail of either the problem or his solution. He exaggerates his expertise, and his research is sloppy. Given the size of his audience, that's a shame.”

Even the Guardian agrees, publishing a scathing review of the documentary. It’s the Guardian so they still think a wealth tax is a brilliant idea but even they are shocked by how unpersuasive his arguments are when challenged properly and how lost he appears when he comes up against the most basic counterarguments to his well-rehearsed talking points.

Gary thinks he’s Robin Hood, the man who took from the rich and gave to the poor. There’s only one problem with all of this: Robin Hood didn’t take from the rich. He took from the Sheriff of Nottingham who was - pay attention now - a “tax collector and debt enforcer” taxing ordinary citizens to within an inch of their lives.

Robin Hood is not a story about taking from the rich and giving to the poor. It’s a story about resisting a tax regime that is starting to take the piss.

The weird thing is, Gary knows what Britain’s actual problem is.

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Naturally, this summer being actually unusually warm, a new level of insanity has been reached with a debate about the need to prevent people from using air conditioning. Some councils have gone so far as to force residents to remove air conditioning they’d installed.

The standard attack line against anyone attempting to introduce sanity into this debate is that they are a climate “denier”. To be very clear, I do not “deny” the climate, whatever that means. Nor do I deny that in recent decades, average global temperatures have increased and look set to continue. And, while I am skeptical about the predictive power of climate modelling, for the sake of argument, I am perfectly happy to accept that human activity is a significant contributor to the changing climate. I am, in other words, a “climate accepter”.

But there are a number of things I refuse to accept because they are dangerous, irresponsible, counterproductive lies.

First, I believe we must look at current world temperatures in the right context. You’ve no doubt seen some version of this graph which shows just how terrified you must be:

What you probably have never seen is a graph of average temperatures over a far more meaningful period, for example 1 billion years:

Do current temperatures look unprecedented to you?

Zooming in, here are average July temperatures in the British Isles since the emergence of Homo Sapiens 300,000 years ago:

For roughly 280,000 of our 300,000 years on earth, Britain was either under an ice sheet or barely habitable tundra. The last interglacial — around 125,000 years ago — was warmer than today. We know this because we had hippopotamuses frolicking in the Thames and elephants roaming the countryside.

Look more closely at the last 50,000 years:

Around 11,700 years ago, global temperatures rose by approximately 10 degrees Celsius in the space of a few decades. Not centuries. Decades. The climate can move with extraordinary speed entirely independently of human activity. The Younger Dryas cold snap that preceded it — a sudden plunge back to near-glacial temperatures that lasted over a thousand years — ended so abruptly that it shows up as a single layer in ice cores. If that rate of temperature change were happening today, in either direction, there would not be enough TV studios in Britain to broadcast the ensuing hysteria.

During the Roman conquest of Britain 2,000 years ago, they grew grapes as far north as Hadrian’s Wall which separated England from Scotland. The Medieval Warm Period that followed was warm enough that the Vikings colonised Greenland and farmed it — which is why they called it Greenland and not “Fuck-Me-It’s-Freezing-Land.”

Then came the Little Ice Age. The Thames froze so regularly between 1300 and 1800 that Londoners held “Frost Fairs” on it — markets, ox roasts, and funfairs on the frozen river. The last one was in 1814. None of these events make it into the standard climate presentation. They are inconvenient not because they disprove warming, but because they demolish the claim that current temperatures are unprecedented and that temperature stability is the natural order of things.

The first thing we need to get into our heads is that neither the current temperature nor the rate of change in temperature are historically unprecedented.

The second point I wish the reality deniers would accept is this:

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The conventional explanation of mass immigration among critical commentators is that “woke ideologues” in the civil service and the political halls of power believe that bringing more people into Britain is an unquestionable moral good. On the fringes of the Right, some even murmur of various theories of the “Great Replacement” which range in emphasis from elites bringing in compliant and desperate foreign workers to avoid providing good working conditions and fair wages to native workers, all the way through to Jews conspiring to replace white people with third-world immigration. Whatever the exact flavour this perspective comes in, the idea is that mass immigration is happening for primarily ideological reasons.

Likewise, advocates of mass immigration believe that anti-immigration sentiment is also motivated by ideology (hating immigrants/being racist etc) rather than reality.

What has been clear to me for some time, however, is that both of these claims are only partially true. Yes, some, as New Labour advisor Andrew Neather explained, wanted to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”. Yes, many in Britain as a whole and in Westminster in particular think that immigration is an axiomatic moral good. The problem is, however, that this does not explain why a series of Conservative governments, elected on increasingly vociferous promises to bring immigration down to the “tens of thousands”, continued to ramp it up. Facing the threat of Farage, who tore chunks out of the Tory vote year after year, they instead proceeded to set new immigration records, culminating in 2023 when net annual immigration exceeded 900,000.

It’s also true that some people don’t like immigrants. But the idea that this motivates a significant portion of the opposition to mass immigration in a country like Britain is absurd. According to that infamous far-right, anti-immigrant rag The Guardian, British people are statistically some of the most welcoming towards immigrants in the world.

Put simply, both sides are misunderstanding what’s happening, often on purpose.

My view is that much of the concern about immigration comes from two practical realities.

First, mass immigration on this scale is necessarily displacing. I’ve only lived in Britain for 30 years, and no one can tell me that the country and especially its major cities have not been completely transformed in that time. Many of the people who live in London today are either unconcerned by or actively in favour of these changes. But that’s partly because most of the people who were concerned have left. Now multiply across every city in the country and many of their suburbs. You don’t have to dislike people to not want the area where generations of your family were born, lived and died to become alien to you within the space of two decades.

In that same timespan, the British people have been getting poorer. As I keep saying over and over, Britain’s GDP per capita is lower today than it was in 2007, before the Great Financial Crisis.

Ironically, this is also why parties of every stripe have brought in millions of people into the country: we don’t evaluate economic performance on GDP per capita. Instead, we measure GDP itself and itself alone. That is the equivalent of measuring how prosperous your household is without accounting for the number of people living in it. A household income of £100,000 per year is high (by British standards, at least - more on this later) but what matters a lot more than that is how many people are in your household. A single person living on £100,000 is in a very different position to a family of 5 who are effectively getting £20,000 a year each.

The explanation for why Labour and the Tories let immigration run rampant was best summed up by legendary investor Charlie Munger when he said “show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome”. If all you care about is the headline figure, why not hand a bedroom to your in-laws to top up your “prosperity” with their pension? When described like this, it sounds, frankly, insane, yet that is precisely what our politicians are incentivised to do. They are judged on the country’s total GDP. The easiest way to increase it when you’re busy strangling your economy with Net Zero, high taxes and endless regulations? Bring in more bodies.

This really isn’t complicated to understand so why do so many people in Britain, who clearly feel the economic pain, nonetheless refuse to see it? To see that mass immigration is an attempt by badly incentivised politicians to deceive them about what’s actually happening? Instead, they cling to their support for mass immigration and the seductive (but false) idea that they are struggling because “the rich aren’t paying their fair share”.

A report this week, however, has opened my eyes to another reason - one I had never considered:

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Konstantin

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Now, you might be thinking: look how “right wing” Konstantin has become. Why does anyone care whether a few unrepresentative areas have a lot of people from a particular community living there? After all, this tends to happen when groups of people move from country to country. People are not atomised individuals, especially in more traditional societies. British settlers who moved to the New World didn’t move in groups of 3 either. A lot of immigration happens in clusters. It’s why so many big cities have a Chinatown. I’m not against Chinatowns, but then again, I’ve never seen a British politician campaigning in Chinese, and the food is incredible.

I am aware, as I write this, that to some American readers this might seem a strange thing to take issue with. After all, there are many parts of the US where you’ll get by just as easily with Spanish as you will with English. But there is a big difference between Britain and America as a British-born-Pakistani Uber driver once explained to me in Los Angeles.

“British people aren’t racist,” he said. “It’s just space: Britain is a small country, America is a big country. When you move to America you’re not taking someone else’s space.”

This reflects in the linguistic differences too: when you become an American citizen, you’re called a “first-generation American”. When you become a British citizen, you’re a “first generation immigrant”. I’m not complaining - that’s what I call myself because that’s a cultural difference between Britain and America.

This difference is partly caused by something else too - America displaced its native population and replaced it with waves of colonists from different parts of Europe and later immigrants from all over the world. With the exception of the people brought there against their will, they all effectively took the land from someone else. Whether your ancestors did the initial taking or moved more recently, you still benefit from that land being taken by living on it. The native population of North America is dwarfed by the more recent arrivals. I say “more recent” and not “recent” because when it comes to land, someone always took it from someone else. With the exception of Australian aboriginals, there are no people in the world who can claim they were the first modern humans to settle on land they currently occupy outside a handful of tiny, isolated island communities. Everyone else took the land they currently live on from someone else. And because Americans have a collective sense of being historically recent arrivals, it’s just that much harder for them to deny other people the American Dream their great-grandparents sought, provided they do it legally.

As I’ve written before, until very, very recently, Britain was a highly ethnically and culturally homogenous society. Your opinion of whether that’s good or bad is unimportant for the purposes of what I’m saying here. The fact is, in the lifetime of almost everyone alive today, London and other British cities have gone from being overwhelmingly populated by native Brits to being majority minority. In 1991, 35 years ago, London was estimated to be 80% White British. By 2021, thirty years later, it was 36.8%. Over 75% of the country’s population is over the age of 35. This dramatic change happened in the lifetimes of three out of four people in Britain today. That’s not a political statement - it’s a fact.

Forget about the skin colours and races of the people involved. When European settlers came to North America and within a couple of generations became the more populous people on the Eastern seaboard of today’s United States, on a scale from 1 (dissatisfied) to 10 (delighted), how happy do you think the natives were?

“Konstantin, you can’t possibly compare the horrors inflicted on the native population of North America by a combination of brutal warfare, deadly European disease and forced displacement and ethnic cleansing,” I hear you say.

You’re right; no reasonable person would make that comparison. But say the colonists had moved to America because a handful of Native American leaders had welcomed them in despite the repeatedly expressed wishes of their citizens? Britain voted against mass immigration in 2010, 2015, 2016 with Brexit, 2017, 2019 and 2024, when they punished the Tories for letting immigration spin out of control. So, in our example, say there was no war, no violence and the displacement happened entirely peacefully and without coercion. Would you concede that in that situation quite a lot of Native Americans might have a few questions about whether their leaders made a better decision than the one they voted them in to make?

This is why I didn’t agree with Sir Jim Radcliffe using the word “colonisation” to describe what’s happened in Britain. But it’s also why I refuse to criticise him for it. Like all of us, he is trying to feel his way towards the right word to describe what’s happened in much of Europe in the last few decades. It’s hard because what’s happened is completely unprecedented.

Never in the history of our countries have our rulers decided that opening the borders to so many people from the rest of the world was a good idea. Indeed, at any other point in human history, the suggestion that we should pursue this course of action would have been met with bemusement to put it very, very mildly. It’s happened. In a very short period of time. Not only without the consent of the British people, but in direct contravention of their wishes.

Words like “invasion” and “colonisation”, which the edgelordy wing of the internet is so fond of using, sound like the people your anger is directed at are the immigrants themselves. This is why the #bekind brigade keep claiming that people with concerns about immigration are “demonising immigrants”. But 95% of the anger I see is directed at the people who did this: British politicians of all 3 major parties.

I don’t hate other people for wanting to come here. Britain is wonderful. Why wouldn’t they?

I don’t even hate the politicians who have done this. Some of them, at least, have the excuse of being incompetent and naive.

The people I am starting to hate, however, are the liars and the hypocrites who want to have it both ways:

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This is why, the Polymarket odds for Starmer leaving vary so widely between him leaving in the next couple of months (unlikely) and leaving by the end of the year (very likely).

Second, and equally obviously, this entire scandal confirms something that anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear already knew: Labour is utterly devoid of talent. Even a weak and damaged Prime Minister will linger on because his potential replacements are, hard as that may be to believe, even less impressive. Indeed, his appointment of Mandelson was itself a symptom of the same problem: the Labour party is so short of serious operators that appointing a convicted paedophile’s best friend seemed like a good idea. David Lammy, who in opposition described President Trump as a “tyrant” and “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath“, is this country’s Foreign Secretary whose most important job is to establish a productive working relationship with the US Administration. Most of Labour’s front bench should be stacking shelves at Lidl. Instead, they’re running the country.

Finally, and still equally obviously, the fallout from this episode has revealed in writing something that we all knew logically but had not previously heard a senior Labour figure say out loud: they are terrified of the Muslim vote. In an attempt to distance himself from Mandelson, Health Secretary Wes Streeting released their private WhatsApp exchanges. Hidden among these was a telling comment:

“I fear we’re in big trouble here - and I am toast at the next election. We just lost our safest ward in Redbridge (51% Muslim, Ilford S) to a Gaza independent. At this rate I don’t think we’ll hold either of the two Ilford seats. There isn’t a clear one answer to the question: why Labour?

Labour’s chickens are coming home to roost. For years, they fostered, encouraged, and profited from religious sectarianism. A significant number of the seats they hold were won by en bloc Muslim votes. Labour naively believed that these votes would stay with them no matter what, provided they continue to say and do nothing to offend this “community”. Their silence on grooming gangs, their failure to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and their aggressive push to criminalise thought crime under the guise of combatting “Islamophobia” are just some of the surface consequences.

The problem, as they have discovered, is that unlike the Labour Party, whose only guiding principle is political expediency, the Muslim “community” has a clear and well-defined political agenda.

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