Welcome back! It’s September, and you’re probably wondering what you missed while you were on the beach. But never fear, The Critic is here to bring you up to speed on all the excitement in the big summer of politics.
Revolution
The summer began with Allison Pearson of The Telegraph asking: “Is anyone else hoping for a military coup?” It wasn’t exactly clear what prompted this, though it was very popular on X, which has become an engine of lunatic radicalisation. “This was sort of a joke but people seem quite keen on a military coup!” Pearson commented, with the slightly worried air of a woman on the brink of an important insight about the waters in which she now swims. In any case, it turned out the army wasn’t up for deposing Keir Starmer, so we were going to have to do it ourselves. Which brings us to…
People Power
Britain is a seething mass of racial tension, as every newsdesk knows, a powder keg that is one spark away from blowing up. When locals in Epping started demonstrating outside a hotel used to house asylum seekers, the British press realised it was going to have to regretfully devote round-the-clock coverage to the protest, lest it spark riots of the sort that so very sadly gave them something to write about last summer. After weeks of the nation resisting the invitation to riot, the bank holiday weekend was declared to be the moment that violent protest was finally going to erupt across Tinderbox Britain. Live-blogs were set up to report on the small groups of fat blokes gathering outside local hotels. The country having failed to burn to the ground, these took on a comic air, as teams of interns combed the internet for evidence of violent revolt with the desperation of an age-blocked teenage boy going through Reddit in the hope of finding pictures of nipples that aren’t marked adult-only.
Suppression
That was, of course, a reference to the end of free speech as we know it that was the introduction of age verification to websites accessed from Britain by people who haven’t worked out how to get round it. As it happens, this was the same week as Pearson’s call for a coup, so it’s possible she was just angry at being unable to open PornHub.
The Long Walk To Freedom
The big news of the summer was the release of Lucy Connolly, Britain’s answer to Nelson Mandela, a prisoner of conscience for claiming that she wouldn’t care if someone “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards”. At the time of writing, neither Reform not the Conservatives have formally adopted setting fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards as official policy. But the enthusiasm with which both parties have grasped Connolly’s case suggests that policy papers exploring ways of setting fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards would be welcome.
In an unhappy coincidence, a Labour councillor accused of saying other awful things was acquitted by a jury, prompting outrage from the Conservatives. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp cited it as an example of “two tier” justice, the two tiers being “people who plead guilty” and “people found not guilty”.
Put Out More Flags
In the middle of August, people started attaching England flags to every upright object. This was massively confusing for the liberal left, who feared a patriotism trap but also suspected that a lot of the flag raisers were not doing it because they’d just read Gareth Southgate’s “Dear England” letter to the national football side.
Bob-a-Job Month
Showing no such squeamishness was creepy opportunist and Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick. He swiftly filmed himself attaching flags to lampposts, and announced that any council which didn’t want plastic tat randomly attached to its street furniture was “Britain-hating”. This raised the question of whether Jenrick’s failure to attach flags to lampposts before August meant that he too had hated Britain.
But then Jenrick’s political positions are what you might call flexible. He also declared himself an opponent of asylum hotels, a subject about which he knows more than most of us because he opened a lot of them when he was immigration minister.
Do They Know It’s Christmas?
Having successfully dominated the news agenda for the entire summer, Nigel Farage’s Reform party set out some of its plans for government. Readers will recall that Reform has not historically been in favour of foreign aid, believing that such money should be spent at home. In a new development, Reform does now believe in giving money to countries overseas, but only the worst ones in existence. Building on the massively successful Tory programme of giving Rwanda hundreds of millions of pounds in return for nothing, Farage’s proposed new partner is the actual Taliban. Hard to imagine them using a big pile of cash in a way that backfires on us.
Staying on the “are we the baddies?” theme, The Guardian revealed that one of Farage’s aides takes the provocative view that it’s a shame Britain got involved in World War 2. We shouldn’t hold it against him, though. It takes all sorts to make a volk.
They seek him, Keir
Through all this, there was neither sign of nor word from the government, which seems uncertain how to respond to the flags and the protests. Maybe Starmer will make a speech in September. Or maybe they’re focus-grouping the idea of setting fire to a hotel. Or perhaps we’ll find out that there was a coup after all.
