The Bethlehem fringes are unforgiving. (Photo by Steve Liss/Getty)
It was just before 2.30am, on a crisp Tuesday morning, when Tyrell Holmes was set on fire. Few were awake to hear his shrieks. By the time the police arrived, Holmes had collapsed dead, his corpse smouldering next to a dumpster.
The autopsy determined that he had been stabbed several times, then covered in gasoline and burnt alive. Holmes was 18. The day before, in a message posted on Snapchat, he had warned his friends and family that his life was in danger.
“Alkhion Dunkins, Yzire Jenkins-Row and Zahmire Welcome,” he wrote. “If something happens to me, know those three.”
***
Half a century earlier, the writer Joan Didion had travelled to San Francisco to report on the “social haemorrhaging” of Sixties America. She wanted to bear witness to a nation’s decay and reveal its impact on a disoriented youth. These children, she wrote, “drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins”; these children “were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together”.
On San Francisco’s streets she found a generation numbed by narcotics and ideological incoherence: a youth no longer in revolt — but in stupor. “It was not a country in open revolution,” she wrote in her essay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America.”
That was 1967. But what of today? If San Francisco once embodied a country collapsing under the weight of its contradictions, where is our Bethlehem?
As the curtain falls on an election campaign defined by its own ideological incoherence, there is no longer one single locus for the nation’s disaffected. For at least a decade, there have been many Bethlehems here: Philadelphia, Oakland, Seattle, San Francisco. And more recently, this “haemorrhaging” has spread to unexpected corners of the country.
Today, one place more than any other embodies this anomie. A rust-belt city that serves as a mirror to the nation. A city in America’s most important battleground state; in a county that has predicted the winner of every US election since 1912 bar three. A city that happens to be called Bethlehem.
***
Here, on the surface at least, the centre appears to be holding. Bethlehem is safely ensconced in Pennsylvania’s portion of the Greater Appalachian Valley, and bisected by the gentle Lehigh River. It oozes college-cute charm. Tim Walz held a rally at one of the city’s high schools back in September and was mocked for admitting “we can’t afford four more years of this”. But in Bethlehem, the gaffe went mostly unnoticed.
Earlier this year, it was awarded Unesco World Heritage Status, and it feels like the city is still celebrating. On Bethlehem’s Main Street, crimson leaves fall to the pavement, where they turn to gold. There is a choir of beautiful churches, an ice cream parlour, two taprooms — one selling beer; the other organic olive oil — and a shop selling Palestinian flags.
At one end, almost out of sight, Donald Trump’s campaign team have set up an office. “The building is owned by a Democrat,” the flag-seller tells me, before shrugging. “I guess money talks.” On the city’s fringes, Trump and Harris yard signs face off against each other, while Democrat billboards flank its entry roads.
True to its name, Bethlehem has always been drawn to the Holy Land. Since 1741, when devout Moravian travellers founded the settlement on 24 December, Christmas has been central to the city’s identity. Within six years, it boasted America’s first decorated Christmas tree. These days, it’s known as the “Christmas City” and, from November onwards, tourists come to worship in the city’s festive gift shops. The most devout get married in the opulent Hotel Bethlehem, where December weddings start at $18,000. “It was perfect,” purrs one Bethlehem bride.
But across the river, the rusted hulk of the city’s former steelworks speaks to a different chapter in the city’s history. If Bethlehem gave America its Christmas spirit, it also built its backbone. The Chrysler Building, Alcatraz Island, the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge — all were forged with steel produced in its 16-story blast furnaces. By 1940, roughly 40% of New York City’s skyline was constructed with materials from Bethlehem Steel. Three years later, during the Second World War, its workers constructed the equivalent of one battleship per day. As Walz said during his visit, it was Bethlehem Steel that “freed the world from Nazi oppression”.
Then came the post-war reconstruction, when Japan and Germany rebuilt their own plants, and more efficient steelworks were devised in America. When the global recession hit in the Eighties, Bethlehem Steel’s fate was sealed. It clung on until 1995, when the city’s steelmaking tradition died in one final nostalgic cascade of fire and ore. A worker whistled “Amazing Grace” over a speaker system on the furnace floor, and the steelworks fell silent.
Today, the land is owned by that other great American business: a casino company. Many of the old factory buildings remain empty and fenced off; a handful are occupied by start-ups and event companies. Tucked away at one end is the casino, whose shopping centre, spa and dizzying array of 4,000 betting terminals attract gambler-tourists ferried in and out on coaches from New York’s Chinatown. Britney Spears held a show there in 2018; next month, Engelbert Humperdinck is flying in.
Under the shadow of the five remaining defunct furnaces, I find Tom Sedor, a third-generation steelworker. His family history charts the industry’s decline. Sedor’s grandfather was a blacklisted union man during the First World War. His father was also a union man, until he was killed when a furnace blew up in 1948. Sedor himself worked on the plant’s electrics, right up until Bethlehem Steel closed.
“The hardest part was the Rule of 85,” he explains, where a worker could only retire with a full pension if their age and period of service added up to 85 or more. “Many men had to go to other plants, mostly in Baltimore, and that led to a lot of divorces.”
Sedor, 83, will be voting Democrat, but only because, as a lifelong union man, he could never vote for Trump. “At least Harris has visited Pennsylvania, unlike Hillary Clinton,” he says. But will life get better? “I don’t think so. Take the casino. Yes, it brings jobs, but they’re not well-paid.” He points out that the minimum wage in Pennsylvania is the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour; more than half of the rate in neighbouring New Jersey.
“How is anyone supposed to pay their rent with that?”
***
At the time of his death in April 2018, Tyrell Holmes rented a flat with two of his killers, Alkhion Dunkins and Yzire Jenkins-Row. “Back then, the landlord didn’t care how you made your money,” says one former resident.
On the night of the murder, just after midnight, neighbours heard a fight break out in their third-floor apartment. There was a shriek followed by a crash — and then silence. Holmes had been strangled unconscious. He was then dragged down the stairwell and thrown into an idling car. It quietly drove off.
Today, the block of flats on East Raspberry Street, a short walk from Bethlehem’s centre, is owned by a different letting company, but a handful of its residents remain the same. Elle, 31, has lived in the flat next to Holmes for six years. “I used to let them into the building when they forgot their keys,” she tells me. They played loud music, she says, but “didn’t cause any problems”. On the night itself, Elle and her husband came home just before 3.00am, after closing up a nearby bar. “They were next door, quickly packing up their shit — and then they just left.”
The next day, a forensic team arrived. She never saw the young men again.
“The building is still a piece of shit,” Elle adds. “They don’t fix anything.” But at least the rent is relatively cheap: it costs $1,100 a month for a two-bedroom flat, half the price of the going rate. “I’ve been lucky they haven’t raised it,” the tattoo artist admits.
Just around the corner, a new block of flats is being built, where a new studio costs around $2,000. “At least five of these developments have gone up in recent years,” Elle says, “and nobody local can afford them.”
But these flats aren’t built for those born in Bethlehem. Since the pandemic, wealthier residents of New York and Philadelphia have been moving in, just a 90-minute commute. Coupled with Bethlehem’s growing student population — it boasts two private universities — and rental and house prices rose by 40% between 2019 and 2023.
Priced out of their homes by the newcomers, 111 former residents now live on the streets, many of whom are fed by New Bethany, a food bank not far from the steelworks. “This is the worst we’ve ever seen it,” says its director Marc Rittle. He estimates there’s been a 91% increase in homelessness since the pandemic, when the government increased food stamps and cash assistance to those on lower incomes. But when the pandemic was officially declared over in May last year, that support was withdrawn.
The fall-out was unforgiving. Walk east along the south bank of the Lehigh River, past the “No Trespassing” sign and over the rusted railroad track. There, under a motorway bridge, lurks evidence of the city’s homelessness crisis: a camp that, in the dusk sunlight, might have been built by Huck Finn. The despair is ordered. Thick duvets lie across a corrugated metal platform; knee-high piles of books slouch against the back wall; at the far end a dozen DVDs are waiting to be watched on a television that doesn’t exist.
Carlos, 57, has been here a year, after the company that employed him as a forklift driver shut down. “The weekends are particularly hard,” he explains, as the nearby food bank is closed. Despite coming to America from Puerto Rico almost 40 years ago — a third of Bethlehem is Hispanic — he has no identity papers, which means he can’t apply for housing or financial support.
“I’ve just got to be hopeful,” he says calmly, when I ask about the election. “That’s all I got.” And he shrugs.
Across the river, some 50 other people have set up a larger encampment, but Carlos prefers the quiet. Sometimes he goes over to fish with them. There are 30-odd tents. Most of their occupants are waiting for manual work to come around, but few are as hopeful as Carlos. Some have lived there for more than five years, and plan to stay for another five. “This is our home now,” says one. Further up the river, another says he’s too busy to talk; he returns to his plank of wood and starts to aimlessly drill holes.
George, by contrast, doesn’t need a tent. Instead, despite working at New Bethany and claiming social security, he spends each night sleeping in his car. Last year, his rent increased from $875 to $1,000 — and he couldn’t afford the difference. “I park down by the hospital,” the former construction worker, 69, explains. “It’s one of the safest places you can stay because of the security guard.” To avoid suspicion before nightfall, he moves from carpark to carpark, along with a small cortège of other car-sleepers.
Unprompted, George describes how, after his daughter died in June, he started drinking to forget the pain and the elements. “But I drank so much I got hospitalised and have been sober since,” he adds. And now he feels the cold.
When I ask how his daughter died, he replies as if I should already know the answer: “Fentanyl.”
***
Over the past five years, there have been more than 600 opioid overdoses in Bethlehem. As one resident, whose flat overlooks the dumpster where Tyrell Holmes was burnt alive, told me: “There are drug deals here every night.”
Five days before Holmes’s death, five members of Bethlehem’s “Money Rules Everything” (MRE) gang robbed a drug dealer. Such “drug rips” — where dealers or suppliers are targeted — had become increasingly common in Bethlehem.
The robbery didn’t go to plan. As the young men escaped with a bag of marijuana, one dropped his phone. When the dealer turned it on, there were two faces on its background: Alkhion Dunkins and the phone’s owner, Tyrell Holmes.
The police are still piecing together what happened in the short period between that night and Holmes’s murder. Witnesses have been reluctant to provide testimony or evidence; in 2021; one of the killers, Jenkins-Rowe, was accused of witness intimidation from his prison cell. (In Pennsylvania, first-degree murder still carries the death sentence.)
But some facts are known. After the robbery, Alkhion Dunkins — Holmes’s flatmate and fellow MRE member — started to receive threats from the dealer the gang had targeted. Holmes, meanwhile, had become the subject of an internal investigation. He stood accused of stealing from MRE and associating with members of a rival gang.
“Tyrell lived two lives,” a friend tells me. “But he didn’t deserve to die like that.” She tries to explain why many of their male friends were drawn into crime: “They feel like drug dealing is the only way they can live. There isn’t much out there for them, and they’re trying to control the chaos.” When I ask if she thinks the election will alter anything, she responds: “Nothing is going to change. If anything, everything is going to get worse. It always does.”
Elle, Holmes’s next-door neighbour, agrees. “What pisses me off is that both parties only care about minute things when there’s so much other shit going on.” I ask what she means. “Abortion and stuff is obviously important. But what about the economy? What about the drugs?”
Fentanyl has continued to flow through Bethlehem’s backstreets since the last election. “When I was 16, three of my best friends got addicted to heroin,” Elle says. “But now heroin doesn’t even exist. It’s just fentanyl. It’s everywhere.”
This year alone, there have already been 52 opioid overdoses in Bethlehem, down on last year but still significantly higher than the national average. Indeed, in the state as a whole, one Pennsylvanian dies of an overdose every two hours. Dotted around Bethlehem are purple boxes containing Naxolene, which is used to reverse opioid overdoses. There is one in the visitor centre at the steelworks, next to a vending machine selling snacks.
Those who overdose in Bethlehem skew young. They are mostly the children of the steelworker generation, and sometimes the grandchildren. In San Francisco, Didion met a five-year-old girl whose mother feeds her acid. In Bethlehem, the situation is as desperate. Earlier this year, a mother pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter after her two-year-old son died of a fentanyl overdose in her home. She had fallen asleep with the child’s father, who awoke to find their son unresponsive, his lips turned blue.
When I visit her house, nobody answers the door. Further up the street, her family’s business is still in operation. It claims to be Bethlehem’s “most trusted” seller of windows.
***
Before Holmes was murdered, there were at least four gangs operating in and around Bethlehem. Most had alliances with other street organisations — the Latin Kings in Chicago, for instance, or the African-American Bloods in Los Angeles and their rivals the Crips.
But Money Rules Everything was different: it was a strictly “neighbourhood gang” — it was born in Bethlehem.
When it was founded in 2013, MRE’s eight or so members took over the city’s Pembroke housing development. Less than a 10-minute drive from Bethlehem’s World Heritage sites, Pembroke is home to 196 low-income housing units that the council now wants to demolish. Squatting on the city’s borderlands, the estate is flanked by a petrol station and a dusty park overlooked by a sweet factory.
Maggie is sitting in the project’s playpark. She lived on the estate with her boyfriend Lewis until two years ago, when their house was destroyed in a fire. Maggie, 33, now stays with a friend nearby; Lewis, 50, surfs Pembroke’s sofas — or, when there isn’t one free, sleeps in a tent in a nearby wood. “There’s no real financial support,” he tells me. “Everyone here is in some sort of trouble,” Maggie adds.
Neither Lewis nor Maggie are registered to vote. “What’s the point?” Lewis asks. Maggie claims a man came by a few weeks ago asking if she wanted to put her name down. “Afterwards, he offered to sell me weed,” she adds.
When he was growing up, Tyrell used to spend a lot of time in Pembroke, and I ask if they remember him. “We all remember that kid’s death,” she says. “The one who was burnt.” And his killers? Didn’t they grow up around here too?
“Oh yeah,” Maggie adds. “One of their moms still lives here.” She points. “That house there. The one with the light on.”
When Tyrell Holmes named his would-be killers, he didn’t know one of his oldest friends would be among them. He had grown up with Miles Harper; their families had even attended the same church when they were children. But for Harper, fraternising with a rival gang was worse than sin.
To date, Harper is the only killer to have pleaded guilty to Holmes’s death; when he was sentenced in 2019, he was already in prison for shooting two men outside a shopping mall. Holmes’s other three killers are due in court next spring; nobody in Bethlehem doubts their guilt. Even the judge admitted he’d never presided over such a pitiless crime.
“I’m Miles’s mother,” says the woman at the door when I explain why I’m standing on her porch. Tonie Harper is reluctant to talk about her son, saying only that little has changed on the Pembroke estate since he was arrested. Only slightly more forthcoming is Miles’s older brother, Xavier, a puckish figure in his late twenties.
“I was just praying when you arrived,” he explains. “It’s clearly a sign.” When I ask if he agrees with his mother that life hasn’t improved over the past six years, he says that it’s what God would’ve wanted. When I ask about his brother and Holmes, he repeats himself. Every question is met with the same response: an appeal to God. The conversation briefly turns to politics. He won’t be voting in the election.
A friend of Holmes later puts me in touch with his older brother. Now 27, he lives in Florida, where he works in construction after serving a four-year term in the army.
“Tyrell was a good kid,” he says. It’s Bethlehem that’s bad. “It’s like a horror movie — it’s like a dark hole there.” He’s not keeping up with the police investigation. He has no explanation for the bleak impulses behind Holmes’s murder. Nobody does.
No one knows how an 18-year-old was led into the dark hole which led to him being strangled, stabbed and then burnt alive. Few seem to care. In 1967, Didion concluded that, “once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomisation could be reversed”. Half a century later, the pretence endures. Despite Bethlehem being a “political battleground”, the city’s hopeless fringes are still ignored: regardless of who wins, things will continue to fall apart.
“There’s nothing special about Bethlehem,” Holmes’s brother adds. “It’s the same as everywhere else.”
I ask him about the election, and Bethlehem’s outsized role in picking its winner.
“I don’t care,” he says. “You might as well flip a coin.”
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SubscribeLabour or Tory – My choice.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which”
I have decided to resign from my post as voter, as I have no moves left.
How about moves right?
Cute, but no cigar!
Yup. Me too. Resigned / retired as a member of the voting classes.
by not voting you merely allow the pigs in with fewer votes!
I’ll vote again when there is a box on the ballot paper for “None of these “and those votes are counted and declared along with all the others.
Good idea, but politics is “the art of the possible” and the only people who can make it happen are the MPs in the Commons at the relevant moment.
That would be asking turkeys to vote for Xmas.
Another idea would run like this:
MP’s terms are (5 years x 12 months =) 60 months.
There are roughly 600 MPs.
So we could elect 10 every month. In other words, a sort of rolling by-election system, so the complexion of parliament would change gradually.
Perhaps the turkeys would vote for that?
It depends on who is choosing the candidates. We don’t get that choice. We just get the choice to vote for a political party and they stick in a candidate of their own choosing. If we had a bit more choice of the candidate it would be a bit fairer I think.
I remember reading a sci-fi book a long time ago wherein the leaders were chosen by some random computer lottery system, kind of like juries. It featured one guy and his experience as Prime Minister then returning to normal life. Sometimes I wonder if that wouldn’t work better than this system. A distribution of qualities has to sometimes beat uniformly awful, doesn’t it?
I wrote my comment before reading yours. It seems we have the same basic idea.
Ancient Greece had it about right, I reckon. Anyone who expressed an ambition – even a willingness – to take power should be banned for life from holding it!
Perhaps 650 people should be conscripted at random and forced to sit on the reen benches for a few years, in a magnified version of jury service? After all, the only required qualifications for being an MP are to be entitled to vote, and to be over 21!
yes definitely. That is what we need as much as PR – a box to tick ‘none of these’ plus a duty to vote. We need people elected but if the votes against+ ‘none of these’ are more than 50% it would be a significant democratic influence in how they govern. We can try it easily at local government level.
Very true, but we could do with some better candidates for the tory party especially in my borough. They keep putting up the same woke cadidate who is completely the opposite of what I believe. Whose job is it to choose the cadidate? I am basically tory but do not vote for her.
I am lucky that where I live the guy is a real Conservative and continues to prove it…that said the current poor party in general will let the Lib Dems in here (SW)
While I have great sympathy for your plight which I rather share, would it not be better to support a party that reflected what you wanted even if it it appeared to have little chance of actually electing any MPs? UKIP and the Brexit party had great influence on policy while scarcely voting in any MPs under the existing system. At least by voting for someone other than the main parties you register some dissent rather than leave the impression that you are indifferent rather than disgusted with both the main contenders.
To resign as a voter is to leave the field to the pigs, whether human or porcine.
Oh, if another party other than the big three stood in South Cambs, then I would vote for it. But it doesn’t happen.
It could if they make an alliance with each other. It would be worth a try.
Where in South Cambs?
Between Cambourne and St Neots
I agree with what you are saying. That would take it back to where it started before it became party politics. Just voting for the right candidate would be much more democratic. I am shocked at who we have been given if you want to vote tory. My heart says UKIP or Reform Party with Richard Tice and Nigel Farage. Pity these kind of parties cannot join together and make an indent in the chaos going on just now. I can’t see any real basic difference between them. They are just watering down the power they could have by being king of their little bit. The serving spirit is disappearing it would appear. It would appear people are hungry for power.
This seems to me to be a very important point that is much-understated. The conditions for a new party in England are now absolutely ripe. UKIP/Brexit were perhaps a glimpse of it – and indeed where elections were under PR they made a serious break through.
There’s no one obvious to do it, and I’ve no idea what form it would take, but the conditions for it are there, no question. Indeed they use FPTP in France and their party moulds were broken so the electoral system is no inherent barrier.
It is, of course, easy to just throw things out on the internet and it may well be that outside of the borderline hysterical media the public at large aren’t that interested in politics. And of course any new party would have to face the same divides. But I don’t think a new breakthrough party is totally theoretical right now.
I see you in The Spectator on Sam Leith’s piece on Liz, which I liked very much.
One seems to have appreciated Sam Leith’s excellent piece on Liz in The Spectator more than most, and I saw your post there. Refreshing to see a literary editor weigh in on politics with an angle markedly different than political journalists. His was an assessment of character and ideology, to which my response is that Liz’s generalisations are similar, a few minor ideological differences aside, to the Keynesian theory of abundance, best known in its sublimated form as ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest & Money’.
I think is entirely possible for the Tories and Truss save themselves with an accute policy shif. But this Tory Party is so riddled with faint hearted social democrats, that even if the leadership settled on it, the craven MPs wouldn’t back it.
On the economy, there is nothing much the Tories can do but batten down the hatches to prepare for the coming global crash and recession. Government spending and debt needs to be cut or else risk government debt spiralinig out of control when the recession brings large reductions in tax revenues and large increaes in benefit payments. The rise in Corporation tax to 25%, however, is an act of supreme self-defeating foolishness.
I find it entirely bewidering that the Tories don’t make the simple point that the debt, inflation and consequent rises in interest rate, are a direct consequence of the lockdowns and handouts that the public, MSM and Labour demanded. Why not remind the fickle electorate that protecting them and subsidising them has to be paid for, and that if the government had listened to Labour and lockdowned longer and splurged more, we would be in an infinitely worse situation?
Where the Tories can win is by going for the red meat.
Pull out of the ECHR and repeal the legislation that has created a human rights and asylum system that is monsterously abused. Are the Tories really going to sit back for the next two years and allow the dinghy invasion to continue and billions spent on hotels and pizza?
Cap immigration at net zero for 10 years. And, as a quid pro quo, get house building on a grand scale to actually solve the housing crisis and get young people in to homes. They might actually think about voting Tory.
Fight the infestation of woke in our institutions. Get the police back to fighting crime instead of dancing in pride parades. Define a woman as an: “adult human female” and kick out the trans nonsense. Be unashamedly pro-Britain, or history and culture. In short, be conservatives.
Fair enough, but Brexiters are radicals – the very opposite of conservatives – so long as Brexit is the dominant ideology, conservatism is finished
An interesting response to a long and detailed comment that didn’t mention Brexit once. Who are “Brexiters”? We’ve left the EU. That ship has sailed. It seems to be mainly “Remainers” (who should of course now be called “Rejoiners”) who can’t stop banging on about it.
Define a conservative. Do you mean one who defends the status quo, regardless of what it may be?
Another view of conservatism is the primacy of the nation state and its relationship to its citizens. The state may adapt to changing circumstances while conserving what makes the society function and is best for its citizens.
Which are you proposing?
You could argue that the vast majority who voted to leave did so in order to conserve their way of life. They’d seen the free movement laws abused and the competition for jobs and housing had had a detrimental effect on their prosperity, so they voted to prevent it from getting worse
Well said, although it is far too late save Truss, and the so called Tories.
Incidentally to refer to Tory
MP’s as “social democrats” is surely a misnomer?
As far as ‘vox populi’ and the Red Wall are concerned, they are a bunch of bed-wetting spastics of the first order.
Good post Marcus but fat chance with this lot!
25 upvotes not bad.
“…the lockdowns … that the public…demanded.” ?
I know of nobody, not one person, that thought that the lockdown was a good idea.
“…get house building on a grand scale to actually solve the housing crisis…”?
There are new housing estates being built in every town in the UK.
Maybe, but are these new homes affordable to the vast majority of first-time buyers?
Aye, the red meat! Sadly, only gaseous vegans get elected these days.
Plenty of ideas – for true Tories to grasp. But do true conservatives as opposed to regicidal mad dog Blairites actually exist in Westminster PLP? They cannot point to the lockdown insanity as the chief cause of inflation as they as govt were responsible for it. Ditto pointing the finger at the Net Zero insanity. Maybot doubled down on what is a hardcore neo Pol Pot Degrowth strategy. So neither Tories nor the warped BBC can ever give a true account of events and their responsibility/culpability for this suffering. Hence it is ALL Putins fault instead. Yeh right..
Labour, the party of Corbyn supporting Starmer.
Brexit reversal Starmer.
Kneeler to Marxist ideology Starmer.
These are the facts amongst others that Labour has to address, not the fluff brought up in this article.
As McTernan explains above, they don’t have to address them. Because outside a few obsessives (like people who read political blogs) most voters don’t care about the opposition.
Ignorance is bliss therefore.
And grooming gang non-prosecution Starmer, don’t forget, like the tens of thousands of abused young women who can’t forget it.
It does lie at the feet of the Labour party doesn’t it?
Holier-than-thou group-think sloganeering that nobody in the real world (outside your particular indignation bubble) gives a fig about
Really? A lot of people seem to have noticed the abuse of under-age girls. These girls may be low class to you and therefore unworthy of consideration, but they are real people to some of us.
That’s what he means by outside you indignation bubble. It was a terrible thing for it to be allowed to happen. Were they cowards because it involved Muslims? It should be one rule for all if people want to come here.
You mean the one who doesn’t know what a woman is?
I must admit that I’m very puzzled (as a woman) as to why it is that men seem to be the half of the population who get to define what a woman ‘is’, and whether women are allowed any say in the matter.
Haven’t certain women have “allowed” themselves, whether from self-interest or naivete, to entertain every absurd novel idea of what a woman is?
In such cases it is up to the men to insist upon objective reality.
Every time a Labour ‘thinker’ arrives on Unherd I think – yipee! great! – we may pierce Starmer’s black hole on economic policy. Especially when the UK has finally – and rudely – awoken to the reality of the post 2008 horror story thanks to the Truss debacle. And what do we get?? Jamie Oliver as Food Czar. You really are a bad joke. There is NOTHING there – admit it!! A bluery wurry hole in head. Islington Labour is still even more trapped in a policy void than the hapless Tories at the very nadir of their fortunes. You hate the gammon white working class, northeners, industry, roads and reservoirs, the idea of enterprise, wealth and .ugh…growth. So you are the nasty party of destructive greta green bullshit, the vast useless Blob, mad hyenas in the uni sector and the broken by lockdown NHS. You will bow the knee to them and the unions just as you did the BLM and trans thugs. The magic money tree is ALL you have – hence a Labour Government will be taken to the cleaners by its new bezzies the Bond Vigilantes if it took power. But articles like this will give Hunt and Rishi hope. You are like Sleepy Mr Inflator Biden.. total empty vessels…and in time you will be smoked out in the same way he has. Two years to go..
Among the first to declare against Truss were Crispin Blunt and Jamie Wallis. One openly uses poppers and the other ran away from a car crash then played the trans card (still seems to wear a suit to work, so he’ll probably be out-transed by Eddie Izzard soon enough). Whatever rights people have to live out their lives, I must admit to grave concerns that this pair are among the country’s decision makers.
If they are it is a big blot on the tory party. No getting away from it.
“Everything has to be about image, change and momentum.”
I always said that New Labour was at heart a PR campaign.
“…it is a new broad coalition by co-opting public figures like Jamie Oliver…”
May I also suggest, Russell Brand? Perhaps also a Keirstone, with pledges?
Things, um, you know, can only get better!
And publish the Labour definition of a woman too! That’ll win votes round, I’m sure.
If they could but they can’t. They have to please the transgender vote.
If one of your party’s leading strategists thinks that Jamie Oliver is a key part of the solution, the problem is probably worse than you think.
Learning to cook is a big solution to the country’s ills.
well yes it would be actually, if you can afford the gas bill
I am uncertain why she should even want to “survive” given that in spite of being chosen by the party membership to lead the party, she is clearly in office but not in power.
She wanted to cancel a bonkers corporation tax increase during a recession & put top tax rate back where it was for 12 years under last Labour government. And this provoked the Tory WANCs (Tories Who Are Not Conservative) like the odious Cripin Blunt et al into strong-arming her chancellor of choice out of the job & replacing him with a Remainer, Sinophile member of the Blob orthodoxy.
Hunt is really de facto PM now & Truss serves no purpose. Indeed the absurdly named Conservative Party serves no purpose & what the party rank & file want matters less than nothing.
Plan for a well deserved Tory wipe-out at the next GE. The aftermath will be grim but it is going to happen & probably needs to happen.
Is not truly astonishing that the first “snake in the grass” to appear is one Crispin Blunt MP?
Is this not the same Blunt who was outraged that the Government was proposing to ban the use of ‘Poppers’?
( Poppers incidentally, for the ill informed such as myself, are some form of inhaled narcotic that relaxes the sphincter muscles in the a**s, thus facilitating ease of access whilst indulging in sodomy/b*ggery and the like.)
ahhh… former ” People’s cavalryman”.. 13/18 Hussars… known as The Milkmen…
I’m rather surprised that CB hasn’t gone “the whole hog” like the late Jan Morris, formerly of the 9th Lancers.
That is disgusting if true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxAi4WxZccA
QED.
Very interesting.
Poppers are also quite popular at the music festivals, I used to have a go on them myself. It’s not just the gays that use them, although I’d wager that’s probably why Blunt wanted them legalised
No matter how worthy and sensible Ms. Truss’s policies – and I make no judgment – the idea that she could get her party to re-election in two years’ time by unleashing tax cuts for the ‘few, not the many’ and threatening below-inflation pay/benefit rises for the lowest earners, was for the bird-brained. There aren’t enough votes in those policies to secure a majority at the next election, so which companies and high-wealth, high-income individuals are going to be lured to relocate to the UK for measures that would, in all probability, be reversed before they unpacked?
It would have made far more sense to announce, as part of a run-up to 2024, that this was the intended direction of travel, and to admit that the measures couldn’t be brought in straight away – because, you know, possible WWIII, oil crisis, cost-of-living crisis, health crisis etc., etc.
But – we are where we are – and Hunt (our previously so-beloved (?) Health Secretary – now has the keys to No. 11. Actually, of course, the Chancellor now usually resides above No. 10 – the better to pull the strings of the PM.
Starmer needs to learn what a woman is if he wants them to vote for him.
He might be trying to learn but probably believes it will cost him votes among the woke.
Some interesting thoughts, and a refreshing change of perspective from the relentless “Truss is doomed” articles – which, though they may turn out to be correct in the end, tend to be light on the detail of how exactly she would be overthrown, who would replace her and what further damage it will inflict on the government’s reputation. Because the answers to those questions are very far from clear.
The article is however less convincing about Labour tactics. Appointing Jamie Oliver as head of a new “Food and Healthy Eating Commission” sounds like a plotline from The Thick of It, the kind of lightweight policy-on-the-fly tinkering that does little more than waste more money and create yet another quango, like we need another one.
The markets are spooked right now not so much because the government wanted to cut taxes per se – and much of that supposedly radical and “ideological” agenda involved little more than cancelling planned increases – but because they were unconvinced about how it would all be paid for when combined with the (much larger) bill for the energy bail-out.
Labour needs to do more than just come up with yet more ways to spend money – we know they can do that, it’s easy to make promises but much harder to pay for them. They need a message that is coherent, pragmatic and inspiring. They need to prove they can manage the economy and bring the UK’s massive debt under control without causing major hardship. Which won’t be easy for anyone.
And it may be true they that few will pay much attention to the Opposition right now – I certainly don’t – but people will take much more notice as the next GE draws close and if Labour still look the likely next government. The scrutiny will become intense.
I’ve been reading Unherd a while now, through several changes of government, and been struck by how quickly after a change there appear volumes of articles with titles announcing the newly formed one is dead or dying. How can any government accomplish anything without the breathing space to act – especially when temporarily unpleasant things are required to fix progressively worsening situations?
Why should they have breathing space? Nobody made Truss rush out an uncosted budget, she could have held tight and announced it down the line when the global financial system has settled down slightly. Instead she dived straight in, therefore any criticism of the outcome of her policies is fair game in my opinion
Having read this morning’s announcement from Jeremy *unt, I am finally past the point where I have anything invested in the continued success of the Conservative Party.
It no longer has anything in common with my interests, beliefs, or political principles. I therefore could not care less if Liz Truss survives or is replaced. They could replace Liz Truss with the Downing Street cat quite frankly, and it would mean nothing to me.
Larry the cat would be a great choice, I think we should try it.
The Belgians had a period (about 2 years if I remember rightly; someone can correct me if needed) where they had no acting government at all due to coalition-building squabbles. The country carried on running.
I think we should try it. Let’s have one full 5 year Parliamentary cycle with no government. Give us a little bit of a breather — some time to clean up some of their messes before we let any more of them back into the creche to wreck everything again. I’d vote for it.
I think she is alright personally but the party appears to want to injure itself.
The Tories’ ability to self harm is something to behold.
Theres a big element of luck involved in life. The last three Prime Ministers have drawn very short straws. Mrs May had the obstinate Parliament of Remainers. Boris had Covid and Lynne Truss the dreadfully weak economy caused by lockdowns. None of these PMs appear impressive in office but in different circumstances might have made a better fist of the job. There’s a temptation to believe that a new jockey will get this old nag home but I doubt it. Honestly the world is in terrible shape and this country can’t avoid hard times.
Truss’s short straw is more than just a weak economy: it is the lack of any discernable intelligence.
She only needs the courage of her convictions. I think she will develop into a reasonable leader.
What convictions? She changes directions more often than a wind sock!
She should call a General Election, thereby cooking the goose and making frit all these wimpish Lib Dem-esque Remainiac CINOs (of which she WAS one)
I agree, she should, for a number of reasons, chief among which is that she is currently a hostage in her own government, which is untenable.
Hunt and his Davos chums are clearly circling like sharks and will do all they can to publicly humiliate and undermine her, which means reversing the entire platform she stood on. That is also untenable as it removes the mandate on which her authority rests; if she cannot deliver what she promised and her government will in fact deliver the opposite of what she promised… she must step down.
Fundamentally, what’s happening is grossly at odds with any conception of ‘democracy’. After Boris was removed, whoever replaced him mid term was already resting their leadership on the limited mandate of an election by circa 80,000 party members. If even that mandate stands in tatters then she cannot govern. But she also should not be removed in a coup and replaced by people with absolutely no mandate at all.
Rishi was rejected by the members. Mordaunt was rejected by the MPs and didn’t even make it to the membership vote. Hunt didn’t even make it past the first round. None of these WEF puppets have any mandate to be running this country, so the only solution to this wretched mess is to go to the country and seek a fresh mandate.
You only have to smile and you get away with murder. I am surprised that Hunt is one of those WEF globlists following Schwab. These are people who want to rule over all governments and bring us into armageddon. They trangress borders and are not subject to national laws.
Yes. What you said. However, I don’t think it’s the change of PM tha, or Chancellor, that means this should be referred to the country, but the high-handed assumption that the party in government can ditch the manifesto on which it was elected and substitute something it fancies better. If Boris was ‘a liar’, what does that make the MPs who went to the country on one set of policies and then ditched them?
Made the mistake of thinking that what obsesses Westminster also carries to the voter
Easy to say you’ll vote Labour, far harder to actually do it
Crickey! Labour’s attempt to pose as a government in waiting involves appointing Jamie Oliver!!
Ms Truss has made mistakes. She should have sacked each and every Cabinet member who disagreed in public. Even if that meant replacing the entire Cabinet. She should have warned all Tory MPs that if they voted against her, the whip would be withdrawn and they would not be reselected at the next General Election. If you have power you need to use it. If you do not, you will seen to be soft and pliable. No leader can afford to be pushed around by those who should be supportive. Those who plot against you or fail to support you as a leader must be removed and silenced, immediately and without hesitation.
“It’s very unpleasant, especially as it has to be done in this abrupt way. Otherwise there is no authority at the top of government,” said Macmillan speaking of the 1962 “Night of the Long Knives” when he sacked seven Cabinet Ministers.
She hasn’t got enough allies in Parliament to sack her entire cabinet. If she did that any authority would be gone and she’d be out on her ear
Like many articles lately the news will have changed by the time you reach the last paragraph.
Sometimes it feels as though the world is speeding up. It’s like trying to drink from a firehose just keeping up with the sheer volume of insanity and chaos!
Liz is basically a good person and the finacial plans had some logic to them. Of course it was a risk but nothing ventured nothing gained. We live in tough times not of her making. She inherited an awful lot of problems worse than any prime minister for a long time. It would appear that the trouble is within the Tory party, not everyone, but those who refuse to be led for one reason and another. Personally I am very pleased with her so far but unfortunately there are enemies within.
Interesting. But the recommendation to raise VAT shows the writer hasn’t got a clue. VAT is a working capital imposition on business, and that’s fine when interest rates are near zero or negative in real terms. But when interest rates rise, there’s real pain and consequently squeezed margins. So, add to unemployment by sacking workers of marginal utility who don’t add value during a recession.
Truss can survive? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Very good. What are you on?
Sam Leith in The Spectator wrote such a good piece on Liz. Of such a different nature to most political journalism, it cut straight to character, personality, and the nature of her ambition-fed delusions. Liz’s love affair with lifeless economic theory, unrequited by the markets which, to her great surprise arose very much alive with real feeling, was particularly apt, with her wooden ideas and love of generalisation. Hers is a general theory of abundance, a sort of counterpoint to Keynes, and as such of equal value. I can only imagine you wish her well for the benefit of the Opposition.
One thing seems clear – Starmer’s Labour could hardly do worse than the shambles in power now.
Was interesting listening to how moderate and sensible even John McDonald was on Radio yesterday. Now for those who’s bias is always out front of their inquisitiveness it’ll just have been the ex-Marxist from the discredited Corbin regime. But to those slightly more intrigued it sounded like a sea change in good sense is re-percolating the Party.
Whilst whoever is in power faces some hellish choices the British public senses it needs some more balance, some kindness and some appreciation this will be a tough period but we can handle the choices we face more fairly whilst reducing the divisions that have infected us since the late noughties. The ideologues have had their moment and look where we’ve been left. The heart of our nation is in the moderate centre and we are slowly working our way back to that.
Well…I don’t know. Western voters (not just in the UK) have been very good at demanding change, but only rarely do I get any real sense of what that ‘change’ might actually be. Indeed we in the UK are simultaneously calling Liz Truss a libertarian ideologue at the same time as she enacts one of the biggest support packages ever seen in a western economy. You talk about the divisions in society – that BLM kneeling picture may yet haunt Labour.
Indeed arguably what would save Liz Truss right now is Russia leaving Ukraine rather than anything Starmer does or doesn’t do.
I agree completely that whoever is in power will have to face difficult choices – it’s all going to be on the table. Triple locked pensions, NHS, military – all of it. I hope you are right that the public at large will appreciate this.
Seems Labour have said they would oppose fracking at all costs. Does that mean they will stop expensive gas imports that has driven up family’s energy costs. Of course not. And there we have it… such hypocrisy. We can import everything but not produce it ourselves. With Hunt now reducing the support package It’s time realism should hit them in the face.
They can do much worse. They will go after wealth and business with tax, and drive them out of the country and out of business. They’ll go full in on the tiresome woke nonsense and the unions will be making everyone’s life a misery.
But the way I look at it, we are heading for a unprecedented global crash that will bring a long, hard recession. Instead of the Tories trying to stumble on for two years, taking the flak for the inevitavble cuts to public services, the bankrupcies and insolvencies, the mass unemployment and reposessions, just dump the mess in Labour’s lap and let them have to deal with inheriting a ruined economy for a change.
While Labour inevitably mess everything up and the Blairites and hard-left break out in to open warfare, the Tories can rebuild themselves in opposition, or preferably a real party of the right can replace them. In five years time the British people will have had its fill of Stateism and Socialism and will hopefully be ready to face up to the tough policies that need to be implemented to set the country on a sustainable course.
A big risk though.
“…the British public senses it needs… …some kindness…”
Er. What?
Not sure from whence comes the assumption that “we” want more “kindness” in our government?
Does this mean you want to fire-hose yet more money at people who would prefer not to work? Or offer queue-jumping surgery to men who want to pretend to be women? Or improve the star rating of country house hotel in which we house illegal migrants? Upgrade the Netflix subscription in the jails? Jail rapists, child grooming gangs and murderers even less fleetingly than we now do?
Or do we want to be kinder with the solvent used to un-superglue the brain-dead fools who glue themselves to our roads? Maybe get the police to bring them a pizza and drop it into their mouths while they wait? Or teach the police to dance the Quickstep as well as the Macarena while people stab each other in a diverse way at carnivals?
No, you see I actually want a lot more toughness and a great deal less of this kindness. And I’ve a feeling that I am not alone in that.
What you have described is not kindness but serious compromise which will lead to lawlessness.
I wish I had your faith in Labour but I don’t.
This didn’t work out all that well did it?
I just cannot see what Liz Truss’s problem is? As MP for North Norfolk there are countless jobs for her? beating out shooting, washing up after shoot lunches? cleaning guns? even being a live scarecrow ?