I still support Keir Starmer, but it’s hard going. The problem he has is, ironically, not being political enough rather than being too political! He hasn’t created a distinctive political persona and told us what he believes. He talks slogans but they are a veneer covering very little – at least very little that’s observable.

Harold Wilson said “Campaign from the Left, govern from the Centre” – and he did. So did Blair. Quite where Starmer is I’ve no idea. Some of his policies seem more Thatcherite than Blairite. Others are reactive , responding only to what Harold Macmillan called “Events”. Behind the scenes my guess is that there are some good things going on. But they get little prominence in the media because Starmer doesn’t sell them.

People can be divided broadly into “Persuaders” and “Reactors”. The former sell us what they’re doing. The latter only respond , and it’s often too late, unconvincing and nakedly opportunistic. Starmer is a Reactor, and people have rumbled that.

Starmer is a genuinely cerebral Prime Minister – a rare thing. The last was Gordon Brown whose intellectual brilliance was seen at its best when he showed internationally respected leadership during the global financial crisis during his premiership. Starmer is as bright as Brown, but with nothing like Brown’s political depth of experience. In truth Starmer isn’t a conventional politician at all.

Starmer first entered Parliament in 2015 at the age of 52. Whilst he had dabbled with politics, and was clearly a Labour supporter, his first highly successful career as a Lawyer precluded political activism. Moving quite late in the day into politics can be seen as a second career and he started close to the bottom of the Learning curve. And it shows.

The best politicians are grounded in grass roots activism. Starmer had no such grounding, The best Prime Ministers are grounded in previous performances in Parliament, often spread over many years. Again Starmer had done none of that. To be Shadow Brexit Secretary to Jeremy Corbyn, having previously been Shadow Minister for Immigration, were poisoned chalices. Significantly he could be consistent in neither job with his previously expressed personal views. As the Daily Mail later (accurately for once) put it:

“In his Labour leadership campaign he produced a 10-point manifesto including ‘defending freedom of movement’ and softer treatment of illegal immigrants. But after winning the leadership he began his long journey towards a harder line on immigration, sparking fury among his former allies on the left.”

Of course Starmer is not the first Labour Prime Minister to renege on his views from his past. Clement Attlee is perhaps the only one who didn’t! But where skilled communications helped Wilson and Blair get away with it brilliantly Starmer lacks that quality. He’s at best a dull public speaker sounding more like a summariser in a complex civil legal case than an impassioned advocate defending, or prosecuting in a criminal trial at the Old Bailey. The former worked, no doubt, in the rather cold world of the Crown Prosecution Service. But persuasive politicians need more passion.

Starmer needs to find his inner John Major, if he has one. Major seemed grey and dull – a huge contrast with Margaret Thatcher his predecessor as Prime Minister. But in 1992 he climbed onto a soapbox and won a General Election he was more than likely to lose. It was clever, courageous and effective. Starmer could learn from this.

Every cricket lover has been there. All you need is a bat and a ball and something for a wicket. And someone to play with. I was Colin Cowdrey, my mate Sam was Brian Statham and Roger was Ted Dexter. It wasn’t a beach but the grass by our house at boarding school. The rules we made up as we went along but the game involved bowling, batting and fielding.

And there you have the game. French cricket, Beach cricket, Cricket as fun, cricket at the highest competitive level, cricket in the back garden with your Nan or your Aunty Minnie (a mean leg spinner in my case). It’s just another “bat and ball game” as MCC Chairman Mark Nicholas called “The Hundred” – except that Mark was wrong. It isn’t.

Yes the game is infinitely variable and always has been. And yes “The Hundred” is unquestionably authentic cricket – and the bowlers are better than Aunty Minnie. But neither her leg breaks, nor my school knockabouts threatened the professional game. The Hundred is killing it. It’s like squirrels. I like the grey ones but they are ousting the red ones. The species is under threat, as is traditional cricket.

This August there were no Test matches, we used to have a couple in that month. It meant that our Test series against India had to be squeezed into five weeks. Little or no recovery time between matches. And it’s going to get worse. The “shorter form” of the game whether it’s over 100 or 120 balls is swamping First Class and “List A”.

The shorter form is lively entertainment. The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) introduced Twenty20 (T20) cricket in 2003 as a professional inter-county format to address declining attendance at domestic matches, reduced sponsorship revenue, and what they saw as the need to appeal to younger audiences alienated by longer formats (like Test cricket, First Class cricket and the traditional 50 over one-day game).

The format was a new, fast-paced one innings competition limited to 20 overs per innings, designed to last about three hours and deliver exciting, accessible entertainment comparable to other popular team sports. The key word here is “entertainment” of an easily digestible type. Fast food not a banquet. As we know the creation of the Indian Premier League (IPL) took T20 into the stratosphere. Whereas the main short form sport in England is football there was no such thing in India. T20 and the IPL filled the gap.

The IPL became a huge financial bonanza. And money talks – for cricket Boards, advertisers and sponsors and, above all match hosts and players. So a format which had a pragmatic goal financially to augment the income streams of County cricket morphed into a money making bonanza across India. The ECB made nothing out of this – they hadn’t copyrighted the format.

From India “franchise” cricket spread like wildfire around the world. The grey squirrels won. The red ones entered intensive care. Kindly caring traditionalists tried to protect the species – especially in England where we’re a sucker for furry creatures . But the writing was on the wall.

The commercial and entertainment benefits of T20 cricket are clear. And whilst the traditional game will survive for the foreseeable future it is being marginalised and starved of funds everywhere except in Australia, India and – of course – England. But even here (for example) the MCC’s main concern from next season will be their financial interest in one of the “Hundred” franchises.

“Patriotism” is actually a tricky word to define. The reliable OED says “quality of being patriotic; devotion to and vigorous support for one’s country”. The interesting thing here is that the dictionary is saying that a Patriot is proactive (devotion… vigorous) suggesting that it is not really normal – it requires some sort of extra effort. This rings true to me.

I’m happy to be British (most of the time!) but I’m not proud. I didn’t achieve Britishness by dint of my efforts, there was nothing I could do about it. Nor do I take any narrow pride from British history – like most nations that’s a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly (very ugly indeed sometimes). Nor really from our character. I think we can be very funny at times and our sense of humour pleases me. But we can also be insular and pompous and borderline xenophobic.

But what about the English as compared with the British? It’s confusing. Flanders and Swann only exaggerated slightly in their “A Song of Patriotic Prejudice: “The English, the English, the English are best I wouldn′t give tuppence for all of the rest!”

In this good example of British humour the song whilst promoting the English calls the Irish, Welsh and Scots “stinkers” and otherwise insults them. It’s a joke , of course, but there is more than a hint of assumed superiority which comes from England always having been the dominant nation in the UK. “United” in name only some might say.

The distinction between being “English” and “British”, especially in sport, is today far more nuanced than in the past. At Wembley in 1966 (above) it was the Union Flag which was displayed. The cross of St George was nowhere. Forty years later this was the crowd at the finals:

Which brings us to the current controversy over the painting of the English flag gratuitously and illegally in public. As here in Derbyshire:

Those that did this did so, or so they claim, to demonstrate their “patriotism”. But in reality this sudden rush to display the flag of England (or in some cases Britain) is driven by more divisive motives. It is an overt protest against immigration sponsored by the Far Right. The undertone is xenophobic and racist. “We are in a dangerous moment,” says Lewis Nielsen, an anti-fascist officer at Stand Up to Racism. In the context of increased far-right protests and encouraging political rhetoric, he says, “the ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ [as it is called] was never about flags, it’s about giving confidence to racists and fascists to target refugees and migrants”.

The London Borough of Epping has seen major protests as seen here reported in The Guardian.

The extreme faux-patriot might be thought to believe “My country, right or wrong…” but that, as Chesterton put it “is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.” In fact the Epping protesters, and their fellow travellers, would agree. On immigration policy they believe their country is profoundly wrong.

So what then is “Patriotism” ? Does it mean what any individual, group or political party wants it to mean? In other words it’s not an absolute but very flexible in its definition. The Prime Minister wants to be associated with what we might term “Good Patriotism” :

Asked if the PM was supportive of people who flew English flags, a spokesman said: “Absolutely, patriotism, putting up English flags. We put up English flags all around Downing Street every time the English football team – women’s and men’s – are out trying to win games for us.”

Few would argue against patriotically displaying an English flag to show support for an England sports team. But that’s emphatically not what they are doing in Epping (etc.) ! Here the flag has been hijacked by the Right to become a symbol of xenophobia. I doubt that the PM is “supportive” of people who do this. At least I hope not!

The core of the issue is, then, the contrast between what I’ve called “Good Patriotism” and the pretence that Nationalism is analogous with Patriotism. This assertion goes back decades with the overtly racist “British National Party” using the English and British flags in it’s literature (etc) :

It is a “dangerous moment” as Mr Nielsen says. Nigel Farage’s Party “Reform” claim that they are the [only] “true patriots” in effect hijacking not only the flags but the very concept of patriotism itself:

Those of us who believe that a measure of patriotism has its place (especially in a sporting context) should resist this trend and reclaim the term and our flags.

I studied Sociology as part of my degree 50+ years ago and enjoyed it. Margaret Mead’s work was a key part of the studies. She felt the methodologies involved in experimental psychology research supporting arguments of racial superiority in intelligence were substantially flawed. There isn’t a hierarchy of cultures with “Western” at the top and “primitive” at the bottom. Later I read a brilliant book “Riding the Waves of Culture” co-written by a Dutch Shell colleague of mine Fons Trompenaars . As with Mead, Trompenaars rejects the sometimes postulated superiority of one culture over another. He says that to understand we have to ride the waves of cultural differences.

Contrast these approaches with that of Right Wing academic Professor Matt Goodwin. He tweeted:

“If you look at the top 20 nationalities given visas to work in the UK last year, only 1 is from Europe and only 3 belong to the Anglosphere”

This is barely disguised White Supremicist rhetoric. The conclusion is not really even hidden. Europeans and citizens of ex British Empire English-speaking “Dominions” (the Anglosphere) (overwhelmingly white) are preferable to the brown or black or Asian nationalities that dominate visa issue. It’s nothing to do with ability or experience, it’s race/colour Goodwin objects to.

Race and colour are the most obviously visible aspects of culture. As is language. Australians and New Zealanders and (most) Canadians have English as their mother tongue and are white. Similarly most young Europeans these days are English proficient, and they are white as well.

Educated influencers like Goodwin (he’s far from alone) are vocal opponents of multiculturalism – the idea that nations benefit from a mixture of cultures among their people. Reform leader Nigel Farage says “we must discriminate when it comes to who can come into our country”…. and opines that multiculturalism had been a “huge error” and that “successive governments haven’t thought it mattered”.

Academics like Goodwin and clever politicians like Farage don’t need to provide rational reasons for their polemics . Slogans will do , and flags of course. These associate what is pure bigotry and xenophobia with a faux-patriotism and “pride” for your country. So the Union Jack and, increasingly the English St George’s flag are weaponised for petty nationalism. This has drifted into absurdity with the painting of the cross of St George on the ground at roundabouts – you couldn’t make that up !

History teaches us that political power can be gained not by reasoned and complex arguments but by imagery, slogans and the purveyance of a phoney blame culture. Reform is entirely predicated on this. Three quotes from Josep Goebbels can help us here:

If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.

A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.

Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated 
are confident they are acting on their own free will.

Preposterous though the “patriotic” demonstrations are, and utterly lacking in either intellectual or practical substance, the demonstrators would no doubt argue that they have been “…acting on their own free will”. Farage gives them cover – he is an “identity” politician, deliberately shallow. (Trump is another of course). They relish binary challenge, reducing complex issues to a “For or Against” question. This cannot avoid over simplifying complex questions.

“… the revolution that Trump began is irreversible.” Dominic Green in The Times today

A depressing and self-evidently untrue statement. It was reversed as recently as 2020 when Trump was kicked out of office and we had a return to a traditional normality under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. That this didn’t continue in 2024 was serendipitous in that Biden was too old and shaky to continue and America can’t cope with the idea of a female President. Certainly both the Hillary and the Kamala campaigns had their faults and faltered, but it was the bone-headed, simplistic and bigoted Trump who prospered not a Republican in a thoughtful tradition – a Teddy Roosevelt, an Eisenhower, a Reagan or a Bush. Let alone a Lincoln.

History teaches us that rabble-raising, nationalistic and single issue politicians can win democratic elections. And we now know from Trump’s dictatorship that even nations with respectable pasts (mostly) and a lauded Constitution can be vulnerable. Trump didn’t need Power to be Corrupt, he was that already. But given Power he created a unique power structure which more resembled 1930s Berlin than Washington DC.

The Democrats need to find a leader in the great tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, JFK and Lyndon Johnson. (Or even Bill Clinton). The Republicans need to shy away from bigotry and return to decency. Bush Senior would be a good model, or Ike. Or Reagan, Sadly there aren’t too many Ronnies around in politics these days…

The post war international political and military record of the United States is appalling – a succession of failures from Korea to Ukraine with very few successes to shout about. The young JFK triumphed over Cuba but mostly ageing Presidents, from Truman/Eisenhower to Trump, have involved the US in bloody disaster. Sir Max Hastings has brilliantly chronicled many of these as he reminds us in The Times today. We should listen to him.

Pete Seeger asked “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” And then followed it with “When will they ever learn?”. The answer to that second question is. Of course. “Never”.

Overwhelming military superiority failed the US in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Soft power did help bring down the Soviet Union and boots on the ground in Europe via NATO worked ending the Cold War. Or so we thought for a time. But the Russians, from the Tsars to today like their Dictators. When will they ever learn?

“Jaw Jaw” is in theory better than “War War”. But the passing of Tom Lehrer reminds us that he said “…satire died when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize”.  Kissinger’s “Jaw Jaw” over Vietnam led to humiliating failure when the North reunited and it needed helicopters to lift Americans and others out of Saigon. We need to remember this when Putin abrogates everything Trump thinks he’s negotiated over Ukraine and Putin completes his unification ambition. When will they ever learn? 

Britain has moved in my lifetime from a significantly manufacturing based economy to one in which the service sector is of greater importance. The former was labour intensive, the latter far less so. Not just fewer workers per unit of output but different types of employee. The quite rigid social divisions of the previous structure have become blurred to the point of irrelevance.

We are all “working people” whether we wear overalls and do repetitive manual tasks or wear a suit and have an office in Canary Wharf. There has been significant social mobility but, arguably, not enough. The reluctance to move to where the best jobs are (in London and the South East) is often based on the practical consideration that it’s unaffordable to do so.

So the old class structure, once illustrated wittily but accurately by Cleese, Barker and Corbett on the Frost report, has largely disappeared. In its place is a hierarchy based on location. The best careers are in London – and Received Pronunciation is the language of the City. Those brave enough to move from a northern town or city to Surrey tend to lose their accent along the way.

The “Celeb” obsession has at its apogee the Royals. And Soap Operas always have characters who are Good, Bad and Ugly as Sin. Here’s the current scorecard:

Good

Duchess of Wales. Almost saintly. Beyond criticism. Courageous. Fashion icon. Wonderful mother. Don’t call her Kate and never refer to her maiden name, previous boyfriends, dodgy mother…

Prince William. Paragon of virtue. His Mum would have approved. Hard Working. Heroic. Don’t call him Wandering Willy and never refer to his baldness.

Princess Anne. Hard working good egg. Tells it as it is. Much nicer than her brothers. Bit of a goer in the past. Sporty in her youth. 

Bad

HM the King. Rehabilitation going slowly but steadily but still seen as an adulterous nasty from the way he treated the saintly Diana. Very odd at times. Establishment hasn’t succeeded in casting aside the detritus of his past.

Camilla. Despite determined attempts to get us to refer to her as the “Queen” we don’t, because she isn’t.

Duke of Sussex. Phoney Hollywood glitz hasn’t worked. Upsets Daily Mail readers. 

Meghan Markle. Beyond the pale. Modern day Mrs Simpson.

Ugly as Sin

Handy Andy. Unchallenged. Should really be Duke of Windsor not York. Girls, Golf and Gormlessness. 

Quite how long “Greater Israel” has been in the planning we can debate but it unquestionably predates the Hamas attack of October 2023 by many years. Indeed the attack itself can credibly be seen as a response to progress on Netanyahu’s Lebensraum plan. That in no way excuses Hamas’s terrorism, but it does help explain it.

The Settler mindset is inherent in Israeli behaviour and rhetoric. Absurd justifications for the sequestration of Arab land even invoke the situation that existed on the territory two thousand years ago. Israelis, or many of them, have effectively argued for the creation of a sort of Volksgemeinschaft community that would not only be developed within the existing borders but in new lands to be permanently seized from Arabs – predominantly Palestinians. This is the dream of a “Greater Israel”.

If for decades a substantial expansion of the size of Israel has been a driver then it is hardly surprising that the many attempts at establishing the basis of a “Two state solution” have failed. Palestinians’ presence in large areas of the West Bank and Gaza, geography that many Israelis see as legitimately theirs, has eventually led to the ethnic cleansing now underway.

The creation of a Palestinian state is increasingly dead in the water. Israel no doubt expects the international community to intervene though the scale of what it wants, the removal of up to 5 million people, is enormous. Whether the West will be complicit in this process remains to be seen.

I blame Muhammad Ali. He called himself “The Greatest” and it was sensible and life preserving for us not to argue. Before long we were seeking the greatest everywhere, and not just in sport. Everywhere. We even invented a new term – the “GOAT” the alleged “Greatest Of All Time” to make it clear what we meant. The problem with all this is that every such claim is subjective and unprovable. It’s an opinion, not a fact.

In cricket Don Bradman would generally be seen as the greatest batsmen of all time. His Test average of 99.94 is concrete, even irrefutable evidence to support the claim – a rarity in any endeavour. But what about the top batsmen of the modern era like Sachin Tendulkar who performed exceptionally in both Test cricket and Limited Overs formats? Which, of course, the Don couldn’t do.

My point is not to suggest Sachin was greater than Bradman but to show the pointlessness of the exercise. How about the “Greatest Prime Minister” ? We’d parrot out “Churchill” when asked the question and it would be seen by some as almost irreligious to challenge the claim. But doesn’t Churchill’s imperialism and his deeply held racist views at least make us think? In 1937 he said:

“I do not admit … for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.^”

Churchill’s wartime achievements were extraordinary but most modern historians would regard his 1951-1955 administration as a complacent and lazy failure. At a time when the opportunity existed to build a modern European nation a tired and often sick Churchill drifted into imperial and great power memories.

My point here is not to denigrate Churchill but to point out that all of our lives are a mix of the Good, the Bad and the Indifferent . When we call anyone in any field of human activity the “GOAT” we focus on the Good, and ignore the contrary evidence.

A key issue is the historical context. “All Time” says not just greatest in his/her time but historically. So to call Novak Djokovic the “GOAT” places him above not just his contemporaries but above Perry, Sampras, Laver, Hoad, Borg, Rosewall, Ashe… None of whom, of course, he ever played. The stats don’t help. Are Djokovic’s 24 Grand Slams better than Laver’s 11 or Perry’s 8 ? It’s actually a meaningless question.

Comparing people who lived in different eras is so fraught with confusion and is so subjective that it actually destroys any logic in the “GOAT” descriptor. My favourite Formula One driver was Jim Clark. Was he greater than Schumacher or Hamilton (or Fangio for that matter). You can make a case for any of them. By why would you? There is no monopoly on greatness, nor is ranking it worthwhile.