Nimrod Commander

Nimrod Commander.

[Nimrod Commander @NimrodCommander]

@afneil When all you have is the hammer of devolution, every problem looks like nail

[Nimrod Commander @NimrodCommander]

@ofjmx @Fox_Claire Recalls a time of much harder hitting questioning on the BBC than the credulous approach we have now

[Nimrod Commander @NimrodCommander]

@bswagspeare Unbeatable

[ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 @kunley_drukpa]

A ‘Smiths’ reference within 5 seconds. Morrissey must urgently intervene and make multiple controversial statements about the Chinese in order to tarnish Andy Burnham by association and defang his sinister campaign of aggressive Northern-ness

[Toby Young @toadmeister]

The Guardian quotes Max Wilkinson, a Lib Dem home affairs spokespman, and Stella Creasy, a backbench Labour MP, saying these claims by @UnderSecPD about "Da Yookay" are "conspiracy theories".

But which one of these claims is untrue?

"In ‘Da Yookay’, you can be remanded without bail for an inflammatory tweet, while a psychopath who seizes a three-year-old and feeds him to crocodiles walks free.

“In ‘Da Yookay’, the moral sense of jurors won’t save you, because jury trials for speech crimes are abolished.

"In ‘Da Yookay’, a girl can escape from a rape gang, flag down a police constable and discover the cop is in league with the rapists.

“In ‘Da Yookay’ you get a free car for pretending to be disabled.

"In ‘Da Yookay’ cops defer to a murderer who calls his victim racist. Then they handcuff you as you bleed to death if you’re white.”

[Nimrod Commander @NimrodCommander]

@NickCohen4 As we know from Starmer, you can be personally self-serving and competitive yet politically weak. Burnham will be the same…

[David Betz @DavidBe31099196]

I don’t think that academics should do ‘hot takes’ on matters of the day. Their opinions are rarely better informed than anyone else’s and cloaking them in scholarly garb cheapens the principle of objectivity. With respect to what is occurring in Britain today, in my opinion a fundamental error right now is to let the churn of the daily ‘news’ cycle drive your analysis.

The legacy media, the government, and the police have all forfeited any claim to credibility; they lie routinely, by omission and commission, and they are actively shaping the narrative to protect a failing political order. Strong-arming victims’ families, suppressing footage, and spinning every incident as isolated ‘far-right thuggery’ or random criminality is not journalism or policing, let alone governing—it is damage limitation for a system that has lost control of the streets and the story.

Instead, fix your gaze on the structural factors. Demography, geography, economics, and the hollowing-out of institutional legitimacy matter far more than whatever grainy mobile-phone clip is being waved at us this week.

Britain has imported, at scale and with minimal integration, populations whose cultural distance from the native majority is large and, in important respects, growing rather than shrinking. Parallel societies, concentrated in particular towns and cities, now possess the critical mass to sustain sustained low-level conflict and, when conditions align, more organised violence.

The state’s monopoly on force is visibly fraying; its willingness to use what remains of that monopoly is selective and therefore delegitimising. Trust in the police, courts, and political class is in the basement and still falling. Economic stagnation and housing pressure sharpen every grievance. These are not transient conditions; they are the terrain on which coming events will play out.

On the Belfast attacks specifically: the operators are clearly more security-conscious than has been the case with the migrant hotel and other protests over the last couple of years—masked, disciplined about visuals, limiting the evidential trail. Some attribute this to institutional memory of the Troubles. That may be part of it.

But I suspect the more immediate and probable vector is simple tactical diffusion from the modern Left and anarchist playbook. Black Bloc methods, the utility of anonymity, the selective application of violence, the media choreography—these have been field-tested and refined for years in Europe and North America.

The manuals are not secret and the examples are legion: Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, the writings of the Red Army Faction, Alinsky’s organising principles stripped of the moralising, the operational literature of the Global Justice movement and Antifa networks.

Remove the Marxist dialectical claptrap and you are left with cold, competent observations about how small, determined groups can punch above their weight against a larger but slower and more constrained opponent. Diffusion of those techniques was inevitable once the incentives aligned.

You don't need an aged ex-IRA uncle to tell you how to do these things. The internet and a library card will do it.

I am wary of firm day-to-day pronouncements precisely because reliable, on-the-ground reporting is so thin. I am not in Belfast, the journalistic desert in this country is real, nearly every dead-tree media and teevee pundit is a literal know nothing.

What I will say with higher confidence on account of my reading of such conflicts elsewhere in the world is that certain escalatory dynamics are now highly probable:

Police over-reaction that produces a martyr or martyrs, further radicalising elements on all sides.

Targeted assassination of a judge, prominent politician, or influential voice.

A spectacular, Christchurch-style mass killing when some individual or cell concludes that only dramatic, indiscriminate violence will break the equilibrium.

Stabbings and gang rapes will continue at their grim baseline; they are already normalised enough that they barely shift the political dial. The deeper pattern is polarisation, erosion of restraint, and the slow emergence of organised ethnic and ideological blocs willing to use force to defend or advance their interests.

All of that is in accordance with the rules of the game of identity politics, which were created by the *very same* people now most frantic about the perilous consequences of their own ideology.

The centre is not holding because it has spent years delegitimising itself and disarming its natural supporters.

Watch the structural trends—demographic momentum, institutional decay, the diffusion of effective small-group tactics, the collapse of shared reality—more than the latest headline. The news will keep lying. The underlying physics of the situation will not.

[Nimrod Commander @NimrodCommander]

If Vickrum Digwa had been stopped by police the night he killed Henry Nowak, they would have seen his knives and let him go on his way. He would have been carrying them legally. And he still could have gone on to kill Henry. Something is wrong with the knife laws in this country.

[Sam Ashworth-Hayes @SAshworthHayes]

I think it's probably the combination of unprecedented levels of immigration, a growing awareness of the costs of our newfound diversity, and the utter unresponsiveness of our political system to repeated votes for change.

Add to that the point that people have eyes and do actually see what's happening elsewhere: they saw the marches, they saw Leeds, they notice that rioting and disorder are now apparently allowed, and they respond to the weakness of the state.

[Pete North @FUDdaily]

Keir Starmer has called for a ceasefire in Gaza. He is already pandering to the Muslin vote, and our foreign policy is to be dictated by cousin-marrying third worlders living in Oldham. Meanwhile, Ed Miliband, in defiance of local democracy, is to remove the effective ban on onshore wind turbines in line with the party donor’s demands.

We also learn that Labour is considering plans to release offenders after they serve just 40% of their sentence in a bid to tackle prison overcrowding. We then learn today that Labour is to allow more than 100,000 migrants to apply for asylum after scrapping Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda scheme. This latest move amounts to a general amnesty for immigration cheats. It will be interesting to see where Mr Starmer plans to house them.

As an opening salvo, none of this bodes well for the country. It suggests Labour could be about as bad as we feared. Already though, Starmer is making enemies by appointing a women’s minister who said that there are many definitions of a woman. JK Rowling, Martina Navratilova and other feminist campaigners have condemned the move. One can‘t help feeling that Labour is setting itself up for a fall on several fronts.

Labour’s promise of 1.5m new homes, for instance, requires a 70 % increase UK house building capacity, which categorically isn’t not going to happen. Opposition to new onshore wind farms is likely to drive considerable rural opposition, while the approach to dinghy migrants will anger just about everyone apart from human rights lawyers.

We have yet to see Labour’s plans to open up new fronts in the culture war, but it’s not a good sign that Stephen Kinnock has been appointed Minister for Health and Social Care. Kinnock has surrendered his daughter to the gender butchers for breast amputation. During the election Starmer vowed to ban the teaching of gender ideology in schools, and won’t be keen to make a rod for his own back, but the new influx of backbenchers will have their own ideas o the matter.

The real worry, though, is how far Starmer will appease Islamists, recognising he needs to win back urban Muslim votes if he wants to secure a comfortable second term in office. If there are moves to enshrine the APPG definition of Islamophobia into law, we’ll know whose tune Starmer is dancing to.

Meanwhile, it seems we should keep a close eye on Starmer’s plans for “devolution”. This, of course, is not real devolution, rather it it marks the regionalisation and quangofication of “local” government, controlled by Whitehall. Labour will put new powers in the hands of combined authorities but with statutory strings attached. We do not yet know if Starmer intends to press ahead with Gordon Brown’s constitutional revolution, but this smells like the groundwork.

On the Brexit front, both Starmer and Lammy have been keep to dampen any ideas about rejoining the single market, though David Lammy has made it a priority to repair relations with the bloc. Precisely what he can accomplish remains to be seen. Initial remarks suggest Lammy will limit himself to talks on climate, energy and security, but this is unlikely to produce anything tangible. EU diplomats have already poured cold water on anything more ambitious.

As to the economy, Rachel Reeves has signalled the nation’s finances are in worse shape than she previously understood, and is preparing the ground for a round of tax increases.

Over the coming days and week we’ll get more of a flavour of what we’re in for, but it will be rich pickings for a conservative opposition. That, though, is contingent on there being a conservative opposition and whether it can take time away from the ritual infighting. It looks like we’re in for another protracted leadership contest in which party will fail to resolve its internal philosophical differences.

On that score, I have no real preference. Suella Braverman has grown on me over the last year, as has Robert Jenrick, but the new front line of the Tory party does not look inspiring or encouraging. The party cannot go where it needs to go in order to win back Reform voters. Even if Labour is especially bad, the scale of Tory betrayal will be keenly remembered.

The good news is that there is no role in Starmer’s government for Emily Thornberry, and David Cameron has declared his intention to retire from frontline politics again. Since good news is in such short supply, I’ll take whatever cheer I can find.

In the round, we are in for a turbulent few years. Starmer’s majority may be a mile wide, but it’s only an inch deep. Several of his key policies fly in the face of majority opinion, and the rise of political Islam has not gone unnoticed. The entire political class is in a state of denial as to how fractured and dangerous politics is becoming, and is singularly incapable of debating the issues, let alone addressing them.

As such, politics out in the real world will continue to deteriorate while the world becomes a more threatening and unstable place. The fate that befell the zombie Tory party is just as likely to befall Starmer’s Labour. A clock is ticking, but the denizens of Westminster are deaf to it.

[Nimrod Commander @NimrodCommander]

@Peston The common idea that anyone should be able to dress anyhow anywhere is ludicrous…

[Sam Ashworth-Hayes @SAshworthHayes]

The latest census data shows 1 in 6 people in England and Wales are first generation immigrants, with 40% arriving in the last decade. A brief reminder of what the Conservative party spent that period promising:

[Nimrod Commander @NimrodCommander]

@kitscheartache Josie jeans 🔥

[Danny Kruger @danny__kruger]

It doesn’t matter who has what job in Government if we don’t face facts about what the matter really is. The matter isn’t good or bad ministers. It’s the slow collapse of the economic and social model that the UK has had for 30 years. Since the end of the Cold War we’ve had...

[Nimrod Commander @NimrodCommander]

@es_aion Mostly fermented

[Nimrod Commander @NimrodCommander]

@NxlAnglo Dick Gaughan version also beautiful

[Nimrod Commander @NimrodCommander]

With the western world’s tossing out of organised religion in favour of radical politics, orthodoxy continues to be policed just as viciously, but has even less to do with morality.

[Nimrod Commander @NimrodCommander]

@TheTVGrump Panicking

[Capel Lofft @CapelLofft]

Many say that the reason why men are killing themselves in such large numbers is because they don't 'open up' etc. You don't think it might be something to do with the collapse of their traditional occupations as they were shipped abroad & replaced w/ rubbish service sector jobs?

[Nimrod Commander @NimrodCommander]

The Britishness that the Queen represented has been ebbing away throughout her reign. She enchanted the nation and covered our eyes to the reality. Only now that she is gone is the spell broken, and we awake to what may be a colder, meaner- modern- world…