In The Impact of Labour, Maurice Cowling wrote that politics in the 1920s was ‘fifty or sixty people’ in tension with one another. The Battle of Ideas, which packed out Church House for a weekend in October, is like that but for political contrarians: everyone who is anyone in British counter-suggestibility is here, and they all know each other.
The US can bomb Venezuelan military and civilian targets from the USS Gerald R. Ford but it’s difficult to imagine anyone signing off on a ground invasion. Cooler heads in the US military may be wary of a quagmire. If they did invade, US troops would probably end up fighting not only the Venezuelan military, intelligence services and civilian militias but also the Colombian guerrillas that operate along the border.
Qesser Zuhrah, Amu Gib, Heba Muraisi, Jon Cink, T Hoxha and Kamran Ahmed are on hunger strike. All are on remand in British jails awaiting trial for alleged actions either at Elbit Systems UK’s Filton research hub in August 2024, or, in June 2025, at RAF Brize Norton, from where flights depart regularly to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, which is used for British surveillance flights over Gaza and military operations across the Middle East.
The killing of Palestinians has continued, sometimes surpassing pre-ceasefire levels and accelerating viciously in the West Bank, where armed settlers, backed by the army, strut freely into Palestinian homes and gardens. New ‘seam zones’ are declared, new checkpoints and gates are set up, and there are Israeli raids on villages, universities and religious sites, all while President Trump tells us ‘the war is over.’
In the first week of November I was sitting with my mother in the tent in al-Mawasi in southern Gaza. ‘We can’t stay here through the winter,’ she said. ‘Our tents are worn out.’
On 30 October, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National introduced a bill to revoke the 1968 accord and put Algerian immigrants on the same footing as everyone else. Many MPs from Macron’s centrist grouping Ensemble were mysteriously absent from the chamber when the vote took place, while the traditional right were divided, with some voting for the RN’s bill. Laurent Wauquiez, a former leader of Les Républicains and an aspiring 2027 presidential candidate, said: ‘When the RN defends projects or convictions that we share, there is no reason … not to vote for what we want.’ The bill passed by 185 votes to 184. It was the first time any bill tabled by the RN has passed. It isn’t legally binding – the president can ignore it – but it is a milestone in the RN’s strategy of normalisation, in which the centre and the traditional right are colluding.
Jonathan Tokeley-Parry, who died last month, had a business card in the early 1990s that described him as ‘Jonty “Brown Trews” Tokeley: Smuggler and Fabricator of Egyptian Antiquities’. By his own estimate, Tokeley-Parry smuggled three thousand antiquities out of Egypt in 65 trips over six years. His success was down to his skill as a ‘fabricator’. He made genuine antiquities appear fake by covering them in layers of conservation plastic, plaster, gaudy paint and gilt. His goal was to make a piece ‘look as much as possible like a kitsch bazaar thing, the sort that idiots buy in hotel shops’.