🧵 We have imposed conditions on a student march that is expected to take place tomorrow, Wednesday, 7 October.

"Just ban it" That was a common response to us urging students not to hold a pro-Palestine protest on Oct 7. We can't ban protests & can only ask the Home Sec to do so if the risk of serious disorder is so high that it can’t be managed by conditions. That's not the case here.

This story has broken me. It has unleashed a rage so strong I can barely express it, but allow me to try. Above all, I am angry with the decades-long malevolent incompetence of the British state: politicians of all parties, the judiciary, the civil service. Their collective uselessness has shattered the social contract and made us all poorer and less safe. In just 25 years, they have led us from an affluent, high-trust society to a broken, low-trust one. I am sickened by the growth in sectarian politics. I am appalled by the foreign ghettos in our cities and imported, bent voting practices and resultant corruption in some of our councils. I hate seeing the clothing of female oppression on our streets. I am sickened by the fact our Jewish community lives under siege. I no longer wish to pay tax to support those who have come here illegally and should be removed immediately. It is to our shame that we have accepted mass immigration without insisting on integration. I am tired of being told that a British passport makes a foreigner as British as me. I assure you that the “British citizen” in this story is not. I am saddened that for so many people, the concept of “British” is essentially meaningless. I am sick of the obsession with a minor war 2,500 miles away that barely affects us. I despise that £88m of our tax money is going to Hamas (because it will), when the tax burden is a record high, everything is expensive, welfare spending is out of control and we can’t even pay for our own defences when the global risk of conflict is the highest it has been since the end of the Cold War. And in spite of how much of our money the government steals from our pockets, nothing, at all, in this country works. Healthcare, transport, education - all broken. It is a stain on our national politics that we have five Gaza MPs. It is our national shame that our government is intent on sucking up to the Palestinian entity which contains some of the worst monsters on the face of planet. It is a disgrace that our Foreign Secretary shook the hand of the representative of the Iranian regime that has slaughtered tens of thousands of its own people, and that he doesn’t seem to understand why that photograph will damn him forever. It is embarrassing that we had a Foreign Office minister dancing with and hugging the representative of the Palestinian Authority. The lack of serious statesmanship is mind-boggling and indicative of how far we have fallen. They say the past is a foreign country, but my goodness, do I miss the country I grew up in. I feel so sorry for the generation that grew up after 2000 and will never know how good it was. It’s not coming back. I have no time for the demagogues and grifters who exploit this anger. I know other people feel the same as I do, and my goodness, do I understand why people are angry. For decades, those we have elected to govern in our interests have instead run our country into the ground. And to cap it all, now we are led by fatuous, asinine, deeply unserious airheads who think serious governance is a TikTok video about pork scratchings, as the last vestiges of a coherent society die under the weight of their malignant frivolity. The worst part of it is that there is absolutely nothing any of us can do about it. I just want to live in a happy, stable, prosperous country like we used to be, instead of one that is run by a state apparatus that does nothing but beat us down, obsess over irrelevances, take our money, and leave us poorer and less safe.

@BulwarkOnline editors asked me to do a "letter to myself" imagining I could go back to 9/11. Here is my story from that day and what I wished I'd known about the future. A Letter to Myself on 9/11 thebulwark.com/p/a-letter-to…

The modern European mind will be studied for centuries

Shetland is far closer to Norway than London. Yet look at how totally disconnected it is. Because generations of English politicians have never understood Scotland, never invested in it, and we have not the European links we should have had created.