The Tory Leadership election looks ever more unlikely to renew conservative fortunes. Reform will be praying for @JamesCleverly success as decent man that he is, he will drive many more to reform as a centrist position on the right will only accelerate Conservative decline. Wheras @KemiBadenoch just seems of limited appeal - its hard to see her expanding the Tory footprint with only a half-serious approach on woke ideology and an entirely unreformed economics that fails to grasp that voters want and need a functioning state and that high 1980’s economics has failed the country

Strategically what do Hamas hope to achieve? Asking this question is inseparable from asking what does Iran hope to achieve? They both abhor a two state solution, neither wants peace with Israel in any form & both want hegemony. Hamas over the Palestinian people, Iran regionally The ideation that governs both is key and is paramount. Belief is not a secondary factor, it is the prime motivation and the elimination of Israel as an entity and functioning state is the goal. There isn’t a middle ground here. Ideologically the destruction of Israel is the aim

Broadly speaking I think this is right - the market state is over - people now want solidarity expressed both economically and socially - and that my friends as I have long argued is going left economically and right socially newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20… Post-liberal societies now want and desperately need an antidote to the fragmentation, inequality and valueless culture that liberalism has advanced. That requires a culture of radical solidarity (it is and can only be social conservatism) coupled with economic communitarianism

In the bedroom of my mother in a hospice, my little boys said good night over the phone as my Mother passes over, contemplating both ends of finite life & the wrongness of death - playing songs from the sixties for her and the plain chant of human voices that delights heaven As her student and then her friend my mother nursed the great Gillian Rose during her dying and her death - she said she saw angels around her in the last days - my mother never lied - so I trust they are now also with her in ranks of red and gold song

To grasp what is happening in the US one has to appreciate the astonishing violence of American society. I’ve never known a society where the poor are treated with such brutal contempt, were causal resort to violence is so ingrained and where systemic divisions are so deep The paradox is that the whole legitimation ideology is one of equality and yet the reality is so utterly different. The penalty for not being one of the (relatively few)American winners is so lethal that it is hard for a European to comprehend

Here in the UK we have a Conservative majority but the intellectual cupboard is bare - we have a few garbled thoughts on big data fused with poorly understood Hayek, and well that’s about it. We are intellectually rudderless which is why we keep crashing into rocks The virtue of Johnson was that he had debunked the old agenda for his new electorate but where are the ideas and what is the ideology to serve them? What and where are the transformative policies to deliver for the British working class?

Thoughts from my interview in @Le_Figaro today lefigaro.fr/vox/monde/phil… 'Radical analysis doesn’t seem to offer a particularly lucid account of the future, with hard left & hard right thinkers both agreeing the state will become more powerful by normalising the state of exception Most prosaic reflection suggests the obvious eg 'Revolutions tend to happen when middle class people are as insecure or as unsatisfied as the working class, evidently one effect of Covid will be to restore the middle class need for the state, so mass welfarism is a certainty'

The failure to support small business owners is perhaps a fatal error in the governments approach - micro businesses with less than 9 employees support 5.6 UK million jobs, yet those business owners are unsupported by either the self employed or furlough offer, as the majority of these owners pay themselves the most minimal salary through PAYE around £8k a year as their accountants have universally recommended - but now it’s virtually impossible for them to get loans without personal guarantees putting their homes at risk to keep going