Utopia, you are standing in it!

Here’s the headline of an article published in the Mail on Sunday (sister site of the Daily Mail) on March 29, written by their chief political correspondent Ian Gallaghar.

The Invictus Games, launched by the Duke of Sussex – himself a veteran – in 2014, allows wounded or sick military personnel and veterans to compete in sporting events.  The inclusion of wounded Israeli veterans in the next biennial (in 2022), the Mail on Sunday article claims, echoing the headline, has caused a “backlash”.

However, as blogger Elder of Ziyon noted in a post that day, when you read the article, you learn that the only “backlash” Prince Harry received was by one Arab journalist with a history of supporting violence and antisemitism: Palestinian-born Abdel Bari Atwan

For instance, Atwan enthusiastically supported a brutal 2008 Palestinian terror attack which killed eight Jewish religious students in a Jerusalem Yeshiva, saying it…

What happened? When? To whom? and Why?

On 19 March, screened by the draft Corona: Defence of the Realm Bill, the long awaited  Windrush: Lessons Learned Report (hereafter Lessons Learned) was published. For those who have missed out on the considerable publicity generated by the Windrush Generation scandal, a short account is in order. The  Windrush Generation broadly comprises Commonwealth citizens who have indefinite leave to remain in the UK or “settled status” on the basis of having  settled in the UK before 1973 when the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1971 came into force, and not since 1988 having left the UK for more than two years. Many of these elderly British citizens were unable to prove their right to live here to the satisfaction of the Home Office (perhaps because they entered the country on a parent’s passport or had lost their papers in the ensuing forty-odd years since…

Ever since the 2016 referendum, economists have attempted to estimate what Brexit ‘has already cost’ the UK economy and households. It won’t be a surprise to see some of the most depressing numbers dusted off this week to mark the departure from the EU. But all these studies should be taken with a large pinch of salt. It would certainly be wrong to regard these numbers as gospel truth, or a reliable warning of (even) worse to come.

There are two main approaches to answering the question of what impact the referendum result has already had. One is ‘top-down’, which looks at the overall performance of the UK economy compared to its peers, usually measured by headline GDP growth. The other is ‘bottom-up’, which focuses instead on specific indicators, notably inflation and business investment, where it is relatively clear that the vote to leave has had a negative impact.

I’m…

On March 17 I noted that I’d made a $100 bet with a friend that Donald Trump would lose his bid for a second term come November.  My reasons were these:

Now that Trump has bungled the handling of the epidemic, makes daily statements about it so palpably stupid that even a “deplorable” can see through them, and gives himself a ten out of ten in handling the crisis, I think his chances of victory are even slimmer. And that’s on top of the economy, which is heading south so fast it will reach Antarctica before the summer.

Since then Trump has screwed up even more, repeatedly making dumb and even harmful assertions (“I might take chloroquine”), backtracking (pews filled by Easter!), praising himself, denigrating others (including governors) and generally looking like the narcissistic moron he is. It’s on view daily.  And yet. . . his approval rating is as…