It seems we’re entering another of those stupid seasons humans impose on themselves at fairly regular intervals. I am sketching out here opinions based on information, they may prove right, or may prove wrong, and they’re intended just to challenge and be part of a wider dialogue.

In 2016 I wrote an essay about how humans never learn from history. In it I predicted that Brexit and Trump would lead to Putin invading Latvia and triggering a world war. In effect, I was predicting today’s invasion of Ukraine.

For everyone, a great struggle in lockdown has been sensory deprivation. A life normally rich in texture and color is smoothed out into monotone sackcloth. The interactions have gone. Even when we can meet we don’t shake hands, kiss, hug; we close in on ourselves, trapped in our own personal space. We crave contact, imagine reaching out and touching, but then restrain ourselves, suppressing even our most innocent desires.

It is clear the response to Covid-19 will last for months. What we are getting used to now is the new normal, not a short term blip in the old way of doing things. To some extent, nature just hit the pause button on modern life. People are walking in parks, cooking at home, staying local, and slowing down.

After five years of telling the British people to ignore experts, Johnson just fell foul of his own propaganda. Michael Gove famously said, during the Brexit debate, that the British public were getting tired of experts. Johnson and many of his colleagues regularly rubbished professors, economists, scientists, and sector experts to pursue both Brexit and political office.

The number of people tested and the circumstances in which they are tested varies enourmously.

75 years ago my grandfather entered Belsen Concentration camp. The son of Jewish refugees who had fled to England before he was born, he arrived at Belsen as Captain Joe Stone, a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

When I was young I thought I would grow up in an ever improving world. Now, I fear for my son.

My grandfather was a doctor in the British army. In April 1945, he was in the group that liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He wrote an essay about what he found. It was a very practical description, a doctor’s view of what they encountered: “Typhoid was raging; there were 13,000 dead bodies lying around.”

If ever you needed irrefutable proof that the current cabinet are a bunch of mendacious cowards it came last week when they all lined up to support Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament.

Like Trump, new British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is a populist and showman with a penchant for lies. he last thing any self-respecting politician needs or wants is a ringing endorsement from Donald Trump. The United States president particularly likes to offer his advice to British politicians, and to the British electorate.

The U.K. risks getting trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle that drives voters and politicians further and further to the right. ritish news has been gripped by the rather bizarre process of the governing Conservative party choosing a new leader. It was always likely to be Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London, but to avoid the appearance of a coronation, the party gradually reduced a crowded field of candidates down to two people: Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, a former health minister.

Theresa May was the last person to leave the party. Kept saying she was off, edging towards the door, then having just one more glass of wine. We wanted to tidy up, go to bed, but couldn’t get rid of her. Finally, she’s called her cab and is off. Despite everything, it’s hard not to admire her, in the way you admire a boxer lasting through two more rounds despite having his eye hanging out of the socket and all his teeth on the floor.

The convictions of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen this August shined a light on the type of people Trump chooses to work with. He said he’d employ the “best people”; instead, he employed crooks. Behind all the outrage, the Manafort and Cohen convictions show that Trump’s government is building an American kleptocracy.

It’s worked quite well having an appointee obstruct the top position in the country from anyone who might actually want to occupy it. However power crazed or corrupt a politician might be, they cannot actually take over the military, or the country, without removing the monarch. And as England already learned once, removing the monarch doesn’t end well and would be very unpopular. (Clue: 1649)

Theresa May has fallen back on claiming that her deal will give the U.K. control over its borders, which is “what the British people voted for,” she says. The rest of what she says is waffle, empty verbiage, or just untrue. We have now finally reached the truth about Brexit: It is about our borders, nothing else. “Control over borders” is just a euphemism for controlling immigration. And “controlling immigration” is just a euphemism for xenophobia and racism.