Having met Blair and his team several times to discuss how to address jihadist terrorism, I understood their temptation to veer towards safety and security over life and liberty. But the truth remains that those who trade liberty for security invariably end up with neither. Sadly, many of the debates we had then about how to balance our safety with our freedoms are resurfacing now in the name of beating Covid. But it is not as if we haven’t been down this route before.

During my years spent largely unsuccessfully lobbying successive governments on extremism policy, I met Blair, Brown and Cameron. My work was mainly informed by my own survival of the War on Terror-era encroachments against liberty. I believed I was granted such audiences precisely because I had survived the human rights abuses of that decade only to emerge as a critic of my own former Islamist dogma, while advocating the universality of human rights.

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In 2002, during my time as a Prisoner of Conscience in Egypt, I witnessed British and other detainees tortured in the name of the War on Terror. I do not know of any UK involvement in my own treatment, but my experience did inform my desire to work for an end to British complicity in such abuse anywhere in the world. Blair’s Labour government was in fact implicated in the “extraordinary rendition” of suspects to third countries, where they were tortured for intelligence. When this practice was eventually investigated, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee went so far as to say that “British agencies continued to supply intelligence to allies despite knowing or suspecting abuse in more than 200 cases”.

It was also Blair’s government that criminalised the right to silence at British ports. Thanks to Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, to this day any person may be detained and questioned, with no need for reasonable grounds. It remains a criminal offence not to answer questions during such an interrogation. These laws were originally intended for Irish Republicans, and came to be used largely for jihadist terrorism — but typical of government mission creep, they were eventually applied to obstruct controversial journalism. The most publicised example of this occurred in 2013, when Glen Greenwald’s partner David Miranda was detained under these powers at Heathrow airport for nine hours.

It took New Labour’s successors, a Conservative-led government, to soften these Schedule 7 powers by including a reduction in the maximum period of detainment from nine hours to six, extending the rights to consult privately with a solicitor and to have a person informed of the detention, as well as the repeal of power to take a DNA sample. Staying silent, however, remains a criminal offence.

In 2006, upon my return from Egyptian prison, I too was detained and interrogated at Heathrow airport under Schedule 7. My DNA was taken from me by law. This is why, during my work around challenging Islamist extremism, I sought to use the limited platform that I had gained to challenge these powers and advised their repeal.

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Sadly, civil liberties were not a priority for Blair. He tried and failed to introduce national identity cards, even insisting that the scheme should go ahead as a question of “modernity”. Blair also tried to extend the detention of terror suspects without charge for 90 days, the amount of time it took the Egyptian regime to charge me, after placing us in solitary confinement once they removed us from their torture dungeons. After being defeated by Labour backbenchers and the Tory opposition, Labour still managed to secure 28-day detention for suspects, which remains the longest period of pre-charge detention of any common law country.

I have always maintained that the answer to extremist speech is counter-speech, not proscription. In fact, PM Gordon Brown cited my views as a reason, when challenged by the then leader of the opposition, David Cameron, why certain extremist but non-terrorist groups had not been banned. Blair, more recently, co-signed a letter along with David Cameron and religious leaders from the three Abrahamic faiths asking for the taking down of extremist speech online, the argument being that it creates a “climate conducive to terrorism, hate crime and violence”. I fear the lines here are in danger of becoming increasingly blurred.

But Tony Blair’s biggest error committed in the name of “keeping us all safe” is one that requires no further elaboration. His decision to invade Iraq under the guise of “national security” and finding weapons of mass destruction will probably remain one of his biggest policy failures. That it was committed during a global emergency with bipartisan consensus should serve as a sobering lesson for all during today’s emergency and its increasingly dogmatic Covid consensus.

Having failed at securing national identity cards, Blair has seen an opportunity with our understandable fear for our health. He now asks us to surrender our civil liberties “for the common good” by advocating for the introduction of digital domestic vaccine passports on our smartphones. The idea is that we would scan them for entry to bars, theatres, restaurants and so forth. For those who do not have a smartphone, Blair suggests that the venue could take a photo to check against a database of people who have been vaccinated. I am less animated here about such passports for international travel, since such things already exist to deal with illnesses like yellow fever, but implementing these measures domestically is an unsettling prospect.

I have been injected against my will, while in jail in Egypt. To this day I do not know what they put inside my body. Any sort of state coercion on the issue — up to and including compulsory vaccination — fills me with horror. Indeed, Article 6 of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights concerns “consent”, and states (my emphasis): “Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.”

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As well as the core human rights questions involved in Blair’s suggestion to make digital vaccine passports a condition of reentry into everyday life, there is also the prevailing issue of minority mistrust. In the UK white people are more than twice as likely to have been vaccinated as black people the same age, and three times as likely as people from mixed ethnic backgrounds. There are a number of reasons for low minority uptake, but among Asians one must surely be the medical malpractice carried out during the War on Terror. As most Pakistanis know, in 2012 the CIA used a fake Hepatitis B children’s mass vaccination programme, reportedly to illegally collect DNA for intelligence purposes in the hunt for Bin Laden. Such was the outrage that the discovery of this fake vaccine programme provoked an alliance of 200 US aid groups to write to the then head of the CIA David Petraeus in protest, linking the agency’s behaviour to the ongoing polio crisis in Pakistan.

But the legacy of this fake vaccine campaign in Pakistan has understandably not been easy to overcome, and trust in public health officials and programmes has been irreversibly eroded. The Taliban promptly issued a fatwa against vaccination. The country’s polio cases among children have not recovered since. Sadly but predictably, the CIA’s actions in Pakistan formed the core justification for an armed backlash against immunisation workers, leading to 56 deaths between December 2012 and May 2014. To this day, local leaders believe that vaccination drives are Western spying programmes.

But Tony Blair’s advocacy here appears blind to any understandable concern around abuse and discrimination. The spectre of non-vaccinated minorities being turned away from shops is not one that any government should willingly embrace. And so, just as during the War on Terror we all did our bit while remaining critical of government overreach, I believe it is our duty now not to simply surrender before every encroachment being suggested.

China’s top diplomat Wang Yi has already said that the US and China now stand at the “brink of a new Cold War”. But this time America faces a far stronger enemy, and the prize at hand is even greater.

The old Cold War was essentially an intercontinental nuclear arms race between the USSR and the USA, a balance of terror that came to be known by the acronym MAD — Mutually Assured Destruction. After the near-catastrophe of the Cuban missile crisis, this hugely expensive military competition led to a stalemate that allowed for diplomacy to resurface, and eventually for Gorbachev’s Perestroika reforms.

The US won the first Cold War, largely due to its rival’s economic ineptitude, and afterwards political scholar Francis Fukuyama was so jubilant that he somewhat prematurely declared the End of History. Not Quite.

But if the old Cold War was a nuclear arms race, then Cold War II is a race for quantum supremacy. Control over Big Data determines which of the world’s superpowers emerges triumphant, because to reliably master quantum supremacy is to master the world.

Last October, US technology giant Google announced that it had built a quantum computer that performed calculations in 200 seconds that would have taken a conventional supercomputer 10,000 years to perform. What this could mean for human civilisation is unprecedented. A stable quantum computer with that much computing power would transform complex financial risk management into child’s play, take years off pharmaceutical research and development, leave vast amounts of personal data open to manipulation, and trigger a revolution in artificial intelligence and machine learning, which in turn would give modern militaries unmatched advantage in war.

Most crucially, a powerful quantum computer able to shave 10,000 years off its calculations would render previously unbreakable internet encryption useless, and replace it with unbreakable quantum encryption. Quantum calculations would be able to crack any current encryption code in existence. It follows, therefore, that whichever nation masters quantum supremacy first could instantly hack the entire internet, from the highly personal information of world leaders to every nation’s state bank encryption.

Whereas classical computers store and transmit information in bits — binary states of 0 or 1 — a quantum bit (or a “qubit“) can occupy both 1 and 0 at the same time, enabling exponentially greater simultaneous calculations. The leap forward this represents is akin to the difference between an abacus and modern computers. To put this into context, a quantum computer with ‘only’ 500 qubits would be able to encode more bits of information than there are atoms in the observable universe. Let there be no doubt that, if reliably achieved, quantum supremacy changes the world.

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This is why the US and China are in a race to determine who will first achieve quantum supremacy. And just as in the old Cold War, the economy will be a decisive factor. In August last year, the US Department of the Army issued a request for information on quantum technologies for ‘Threat Military Applications’, stating that “A global race has ensued to exploit and operationalise quantum technologies for the use of military effects.”

In December 2018, President Trump authorised the National Quantum Initiative Act (NQI), providing for $1.2b (£1b) to be invested in quantum technology over five years. Trump then signed an Executive Order to establish a National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee composed of 22 experts from industry, research and federal agencies.

But China also has an awesome quantum programme to match its rival. President Xi  has funded a multi-billion dollar quantum computing initiative  aiming to achieve significant breakthroughs by 2030. In November 2018, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), the country’s largest defence electronics company, unveiled a prototype quantum radar that it claims can detect stealth aircraft in flight.

Chinese researchers also claim to have built a satellite that can send quantum-entangled encrypted messages between distant locations. Meanwhile, a team of researchers at the US Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Maryland, is working on a similar approach called quantum teleportation.

Though China apparently suffers from a skills shortage hampering her companies’ attempts to supersede their U.S. competitors, a January 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment report to the Senate  concluded that the US lead in science and technology had been significantly eroded, as China rapidly catches up.

China has the funds, and is biding its time. Meanwhile, Beijing’s key aim is to disrupt its rivals as the country rises to supremacy, increasing the risks of the ‘Thucydides trap’.

Last week, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison revealed ongoing and multiple state-backed cyber attacks on a wide range of the country’s systems. The attackers primarily used a tactic called “remote code execution vulnerability”, which involves hackers attempting to insert their own software code into a vulnerable system like a server, in order to steal information. Cyber-security experts have said that some of the same computer code and tactics used in these cyber-attacks were also used in a February 2019 hack into Parliament House, also blamed on China.

Beijing has also imposed tariffs on Australian barley, stopped buying Australian beef and urged Chinese tourists and students to avoid the country, after Morrison called for an independent inquiry into the coronavirus.

Sydney’s cyber-attack was deemed serious enough for the Australian PM to confirm that he “spoke to Boris Johnson last night”. But Britain is also beset by problems with potential Chinese spytech, largely of our own making. The US security services have long warned us  that Chinese 5G equipment from Huawei poses a spying threat. The Chinese state is suspected of inserting “hidden backdoors” into Huawei’s 5G equipment to spy on data passed through mobile and data networks.

Google’s former Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt, who is now chairman of the Pentagon’s Defence Innovation Board, reaffirmed this month that “There’s no question that Huawei has engaged in some practices that are not acceptable in national security”.

He compared Huawei to “signals intelligence” – or spy agencies – and said that information “from Huawei routers has ultimately ended up in hands that would appear to be the state”. However it happened, he said, “we’re sure it happened”.

To protect China’s Huawei deal from being rescinded, Beijing has unleashed a series of economic threats against Britain. The state-backed Global Times warned that the British economy faces “substantial damage” if Boris Johnson’s government did not change course on Huawei as well on the political situation in Hong Kong.

Beijing, it said, would “strike back… where the UK steps out of line”. Citing British operations in China, in particular the HSBC bank, as well as Chinese investment at a nuclear plant in Somerset, the editorial said Britain “does not have many cards to play” and “further moves to cut co-operation could lead to the UK shooting itself in its own foot”. In response, in a review called Project Defend, Downing Street is now investigating how to reduce reliance on China for critical products.

In response to China’s threats to Britain, the US State Department issued what only a few years ago would have been considered a shockingly bullish reply.

“The United States stands with our allies and partners against the Chinese Communist Party’s coercive bullying tactics,” it stated: “Shenzhen-based Huawei is an extension of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state. Beijing’s aggressive behavior shows why countries should avoid economic overreliance on China and should guard their critical infrastructure from CCP influence. Australia, Denmark, and other free nations have recently faced pressure from CCP interests to bow to China’s political wishes. The United States stands ready to assist our friends in the U.K. with any needs they have.”

China’s cyber warfare is also evident on Twitter, the social media company disclosing that it had discovered hundreds of thousands of accounts linked to state disinformation operations. The People’s Republic was exposed as running the largest operation, followed by Russia and Turkey, using manipulation to spread pro-Beijing propaganda and pushing deceptive narratives about the political dynamics in Hong Kong.

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Similar to Iran, China has also been engaging in ‘hostage diplomacy’. Chinese courts sentenced Australian Cam Gillespie to death for drug smuggling, seven years after his arrest, and also increasing the sentence of a convicted Canadian drug smuggler from life imprisonment to death, shortly after Huawei Director Meng Wanzhou was detained in Canada. Two Canadians, a former diplomat and a businessman, were also arrested in China on allegations of espionage after Meng’s arrest.

India, another US ally, has been experiencing increased tensions along its 2,500 mile disputed Himalayan border with China. In one of the worst incidents for years, up to 20 Indian soldiers were killed last week in skirmishes with Chinese counterparts.

The conflict between these two rival nuclear powers largely centres on the effects of climate change on the glaciers. Roughly 47% of the water used by India comes from the river Ganges, fed by the Kosi river rising in Chinese-controlled Tibet. As a result, both countries are building dams in order to better control the most vital of resources.

To make matters more complicated, and volatile, this border dispute also involves a third nuclear power in the form of Pakistan.

President Trump has offered American mediation over the border dispute, but the move was largely interpreted as being hostile to China. Meanwhile US Secretary of State Pompeo recently confronted China’s foreign minister Yang Jiechi with a list of China’s actions around the globe. “I ticked through a few of them,” he said: “Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, what they’re doing in India, what they’ve done in the economic zones along the Philippines and Malaysia and Indonesia and Vietnam, the coercion on Australia.”

Yet the US does not have the strength to fight the new cold war alone, and it will require a new NATO-style containment and security policy for Asia, whereas until recently, most European nations had not been alert to the threat posed by an increasingly assertive China.

This has led to a particularly insidious and weak policy response, barely disguised as typical and unoriginal European anti-Americanism, but dressed up as realpolitik. “Analysts have long talked about the end of an American-led system and the arrival of an Asian century,” the European Union’s Foreign Policy chief Josep Borrell Fontelles stated: “This is now happening in front of our eyes… the pressure to choose sides is growing. As the EU, we should follow our own interests and values and avoid being instrumentalised by one or the other.”

French Foreign Minister Yves Le Drian declared in the French Senate that “regarding China, I do not think we should be locked into a logic of confrontation bipolar world. To not start a second Cold War we must affirm Europe’s autonomy”.

Indeed, Macron’s chief diplomatic advisor Emmanuelle Bonne is reported to have confirmed to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi about “France’s readiness to step up strategic communication with China” assuring China that “France respects China’s sovereignty, appreciates the sensitivity of Hong Kong-related issues, and has no intention of interfering in Hong Kong affairs.”

Germany’s powerful business lobbies are also drawn towards China, while Italy considers herself a “most trusted ally” to the country. Chinese investment in infrastructural projects like the high-speed rail link from Greece to Budapest, also presents economic and political vulnerabilities due to China’s Belt and Road initiative.

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Britain should stay out of Cold War II

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But those in Europe who argue that the continent’s interests lie in “remaining neutral” while this US-China Cold War II unfolds, are deluding themselves and everyone else. They seem not to have yet realised, blissfully wish to ignore, or indeed wilfully mislead others about the fact that ‘deciding’ which side to take is a choice we simply no longer have.

Through its cyber espionage, aggressive domination of supply chains, and belligerent domestic political and foreign policies, China has made that choice for us.

Although some may wish to ignore it, or make the argument for a parochial ‘national hobbitism’, the stakes are too high to avoid choosing a side.

Attaining quantum supremacy changes everything, and whoever masters it will have instant access to, and domination of, the rest of the world for the foreseeable future. If China wins that struggle, the sort of organ harvesting, social-credit enforcing, Uighur-Muslim interning, dark tyranny that governs most of the Chinese mainland will come to dominate the rest of the world.

By this, I do not mean to imply that we should go to war with China. Of course not. But we must at the very least recognise that we are in the midst of a new Cold War, and this will help us formulate appropriate policy responses with our eyes open. Quantum supremacy changes everything. Similar to Tolkien’s One Ring, it is a power too great to be wielded by one man in Beijing alone. If this were to happen, global democracy could be in permanent retreat.

That was the harsh lesson learned by Bilbo Baggins, when he left his Shire in support of the free world. And even though the Hobbits were initially oblivious to it, the battle eventually came to them regardless. The rise of Mordor was simply too powerful and too dangerous an event to countenance, even for the little people in the Shire.

Yet it cannot be right that the Scottish National Party should subject the good people of these Isles to yet another nationalist, divisive, separatist “little Scotlander” referendum, kicking off a new round of an entirely unsolvable political bun-fight that will tear our country apart even further. We’ve had the “once in a generation” referendum and the nationalists lost. Should the SNP succeed next May, Westminster — Parliament for all the United Kingdom — should simply refuse to authorise it.

The SNP is by any measurement Left-wing, a social democratic party that prides itself on being as unlike the Tory and Brexit-voting hordes of the south as is possible. They are Left-of-centre on economic and social issues, fiercely pro-EU and in the European Parliament would align with progressive and green groups from across the continent. Yet this is not the whole story, as anyone who has upset their supporters can testify to.

Despite being a Remain-voting liberal, my views on a second referendum have attracted the sort of racism — from Scottish nationalists — that you would usually expect to receive from the far-right. In many exchanges with SNP supporters, I have learned that that Left-wing racism against people of colour is apparently acceptable, if we veer off an approved script.

But, then, as surprising as English liberals may find it, Scotland is not the progressive paradise they like to believe — and  my anecdotal experience is borne out by wider concerns. Last year more than 80 public and professional figures signed an open letter warning that the struggle against racism in Scotland is “rolling backwards”, creating a climate of “resentment towards frank discussion of race and racism” that is threatening to undo progress on race equality.

It is significant that the signatories also highlighted a trend to “silence the voices of people in Scotland who face colour-based racism”. This letter came less than two months after Scotland’s national poet laureate Jackie Kay warned openly  that Scotland had to “grow up” as it was “decades behind” in its treatment of black and ethnic minority people.

Too often, when minority voices such as mine — children of the colonies, born in Britain — oppose the break-up of what we now consider our country, Scottish nationalists too readily seek to silence our voices by accusing us, instead, of being English “colonists”.

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Such rhetoric is not only overly antagonistic, it also displays a fundamental ignorance about why most ethnic minorities in Britain have expressed a preference for calling ourselves British over English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish. And while I embrace being both a non-Anglo-Saxon Englishman and a Brit, it is not easy for many of us to forget the nationalist-inspired violent racism levied against us growing up, and still present today.

For ‘progressive’ Scottish Nationalists to draw an equivalence between ethnic minorities who oppose their separatism and British colonialism, smacks of the very colonial privilege they seek to denounce. The fact of the matter is that Scottish colonists profited greatly from the creation of the British Empire. Scotland’s debt to Empire is her dirty little secret, seldom acknowledged but ever-present. The “tobacco lords” of Glasgow were enriched by slavery in the Americas and Africa, while a quick visit to the former North British Rubber Company in Edinburgh serves to disabuse most naysayers suffering under such a false sense of righteousness.

The pernicious narrative peddled by Scottish nationalists that England colonised Scotland, and then the rest of the world — and so England must even now be resisted in Scotland — sounds suspiciously like an act of whitewashing Scottish culpability, at least to the ears of this descendant of a former colony.

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This is not something SNP supporters like to hear, but SNP supporters have gained a reputation for intimidating critics. Recently, BBC News Scotland Editor Sarah Smith learned the hard way why Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has earned the nickname “Nippie Sweetie” for adopting the  “aggressive and adversarial approach of male politicians” early on in her career.

Ms Smith had made the admitted error of accidentally describing Sturgeon as  “enjoying the opportunity” to shine during lockdown, instead of saying that she was “embracing” the challenge. Ms Sturgeon’s supporters were not happy to say the least, and an online pile-on inevitably ensued. Ms Smith, though, was quick to push into reverse gear, her resultant climbdown being perhaps the swiftest and most complete of any journalist in recent years, to my mind. Scotland’s BBC chief was so remorseful, in fact, that she felt the need to issue no fewer than four swift back-to-back apologies online to Ms Sturgeon, with one of them remaining pinned to her profile page for days. Ms Sturgeon regally confirmed that she accepted her apology.

So wouldn’t it be lovely if Nicola Sturgeon also apologised for, and investigated, the racism present among all too many of her online supporting trolls?

While it is true that Ms Sturgeon is not personally responsible for the behaviour of her supporters, such racism appears not to be a mere bug for the SNP, but may well be a feature. Indeed, just because a nationalist party identifies as being on the Left, it does not mean that an undercurrent of racism cannot be found beneath all the cuddly talk.

Historically, many nationalist parties and nationalists have started on the Left, from the French Revolution onwards; indeed one of the most famous of 20th century nationalists, Benito Mussolini, was on the National Directorate for the Italian Socialist Party, before he turned rightward to fan the flames of nationalism.

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Violent hostility to outsiders and critics is in the DNA of nationalists, whether on the Left and Right, as anyone who has debated with SNP can testify to. When that outsider has different colour skin the rage seems to be heighted.

As party leader, it is Nicola Sturgeon’s duty — not mine — to make minorities feel safe from the racism of too many of her supporters. And until she can do so, do not be fooled by the progressive overtures of this SNP. For too long commentators of all persuasions have harboured a policy and ethical blindspot for Scotland’s nationalists, viewing them as polar opposites to English nationalists, rather than their counterparts.

We should beware the kid gloves with which metropolitan opinion formers treat the SNP. Their party machine is curiously similar to Momentum, and much of what we would never tolerate from Corbyn now rules in Edinburgh. As such, they are riddled with all the trappings of power, while harbouring a nasty, illiberal and authoritarian streak. Alarm bells should be ringing now, lest after lockdown we enter blindly into yet another experience like the three years before the virus struck.

And if you thought Brexit Britain got bad, just wait until Scexit.

Fuelled by our desire for ever cheaper goods, the world has collectively sleepwalked into a supply-side dependency on the People’s Republic.

The gamble had been pitched as a trade-off. China was expected to evolve democratic norms and embrace relations with the international community, while we got richer from globalisation. But we have been played.

Whether it’s clothing and factory-fashion, personal protective equipment or hardware parts, too many of our manufactured goods today rely on a ‘Made in China’ supply-chain. At the same time as it was busy taking control over our manufacturing, China was busy cloning western software, via her lackadaisical respect for international copyright rules.

And while the world relies on China for hardware, China avoids software dependency on outsiders by creating substitutes: TikTok to replace snapchat, Weibo instead of Twitter, WeChat & RenRen for Facebook. Indeed, there is an alternative Chinese version for almost any platform.

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With manufactured goods and hardware ‘Made in China’, and software increasingly ‘Cloned in China’, what of natural resources? Through the ‘Belt & Road’ initiative — a ‘21st century Silk Road’ connecting China to Europe over a network of land and sea trade routes, the People’s Republic has embarked on huge infrastructure projects in 60 countries, including loans and construction projects that secure key ports and mines as collateral to China for payment.

Look to Pakistan, African or southeast Asian nations to see China’s rapid expansion in ownership of mines and ports. Look to the UK and China’s attempts to secure our telecoms industry via the Huawei deal, her recent purchase of British Steel, and her quest to secure the nuclear power industry. Beijing even secured a deal to develop British nuclear station Hinckley point C in Somerset, thus paving the way globally for China to enter the global market to dominate nuclear power.

Over decades, we have naively outsourced or lost manufacturing, software, natural resources and critical infrastructure to China. The economic benefits of globalisation are well trodden, yet as Covid-19 has shown, it has left our society vulnerable during a major crisis, unable to manufacture the most basic of necessities such as PPE. Meanwhile, China has achieved self-sufficiency.

While pursuing economic dominance abroad, China’s communist one-party state has centralised political power at home, gained unprecedented command over her own population via wide ranging and well-documented spy-tech, and placed anything between 1 to 2 million Uigur Muslims in gulags.

Considering what we know of colonial history, there is little room for doubt that China is at a pre-colonial stage. States at this stage attempt to centralise domestic power under a strong leader, dominate global supply chains and monopolise industry, all the while expanding abroad to secure natural resources. China is aggressively pursuing total national self-sufficiency, and the question arises as to why.

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China is not the hero in this darkest hour

By Ian Birrell

My conclusion is that China is preparing for war: total, not limited war. The kind that seeks to rebalance the world order, tipping it in her favour by replacing the US as the dominant global power. Historically, major conflicts have arisen when the leading global power is challenged by a rival, a problem known as the Thucydides trap — and China is expected (by some metrics) to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy this decade.

Also, and crucially unlike us, China is preparing for the next type of war. The People’s Republic knows that she cannot beat the US militarily — and she knows that type of ground war is almost over.

Instead, by securing global supply chains, maintaining IT independence, and having a cast-iron grip over her own population, China can focus on building her cyber and biological war capabilities while remaining relatively safeguarded against the same herself. Considering all of this, from steel to nuclear to telecoms, our policy towards China until 2020 can best be described as one of miserably failed economic appeasement. From China’s perspective, she has successfully gifted us a Trojan Horse.

So what is the solution? Do we take that bait and prepare for war too? No. We must first understand what happened, and grasp how it came that we so willingly handed China the very tools by which to defeat us.

For too long, China has had a strategy for dealing with us, while we have had no strategy for dealing with China. We must urgently pivot our strategic relationship, one that entails assuming that China is in a Cold War with us already, and ends our current naivety.

We must minimise our total global supply-chain dependency on China, or any one nation for that matter. Trade with China, yes, but we must ringfence critical infrastructure: nuclear, telecoms and natural resources such as steel.

As recent politicisation of the WHO highlights, the post-war international community — supposedly governed by the UN — is no longer serving its purpose, and perhaps more than ever the UN faces a crisis in moral authority. Instead, NATO-style, we must reorder our strategic and military alliances around the Pacific and build an international consensus against the broader expansionist desire of the Chinese Communist Party.

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Covid-19 has exposed our financial fragility

By Jonathan Tepper

Just like with nuclear non-proliferation, there must be newly-developed global consequences for negligence in cyber and bio hazard safety. Post-Covid, we would be wise to build a new global consensus on which punitive measures are suited to states that violate our cyber or biological safety.

Whatever happens in China does not stay in China. Whereas our Orientalist based ‘othering’ of China created this blind spot, only our hubris and naivety would allow for us to continue thus blind. We have been outmaneuvered, but this pandemic has magnified our failures and brought them to the fore. We would only be deserving of loss if we did not learn the lessons now.

They valued this over all other sources of information because, in a world where state-run news organisations were often mouthpieces for dishonest regimes, the BBC’s honesty and integrity was a gold standard.

To have built up that level of credibility and trust, so that even self-avowed enemies of Britain relied on our news service, is testimony to the achievement of the BBC and decades of reputation-building. It is an achievement too important to be squandered. In a time of “deep fakes” and commercialised American cable “news” producing distorted partisan rubbish, resisting the democratisation of truth for “alternative facts” carries a social value worth subsidising.

Yet as a new chapter in the political dispute between the Government and the BBC unfolds, and battle lines are drawn between progressives and conservatives, it would be odd and inconsistent for the Left to side with a national institution simply because of nostalgia and tradition. It is an institution, and like all institutions it needs to reform.

Downing Street is openly exploring plans to scrap the licence fee and introduce a subscription model, forcing the sale of most of the corporation’s regional radio output. Left-wing and liberal commentators have looked on aghast, accusing the Prime Minister of cultural vandalism. But while this is a necessary debate to be had, to have it along party political lines would be — as is usually the case with our tribal politics — deeply inconsistent.

The BBC is our National Church, and comes replete with its own temples, gods and saints to match. It’s an institution that brings us together and defines our identity as a nation, and has seen us through some very bad times. It’s natural that we should revere it. And like a Church, it has become too holy for its followers, in this case liberals, to touch.

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A frequent progressive criticism of religion centres on its tendency to resist change. The Church, or any large institution for that matter, is usually invested heavily in the status quo — slow to adapt and unable to pivot from within. Its supporters are naturally resistant to progress and those on the inside, full to the brim and drunk on the feast, are usually the last to perceive the problem as the rot sets in.

As a progressive, I see that the BBC has become undeniably bloated, squeezing out local competition and stifling start-up innovation. Like with US tech giants, its very size gives it too much power and prevents competition from being able to thrive.

But my desire is not to destroy this famous British institution — I want to reform it, repair it and resurrect it anew. And not before time.

Discontent was brewing long before the Government arrived in Downing Street. Long before excessive executive pay was revealed as an issue, long before the issue of gender pay gaps were settled in court, the BBC followed other major institutions in losing the public’s faith.

The BBC, rather like the Church, also suffered its very own paedophile sex scandal when its revered and untouchable High Priest Jimmy Savile using his position to abuse countless children. After this, it was going to take many years to win back public trust.

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How Lefty luvvies lost the plot

By Gareth Roberts

The near-monopoly power over British broadcasting, and the institutional heft that comes with this power, is unfairly subsidised by a regressive flat tax that makes it a criminal offence not to pay the licence fee for watching any live programme, on any device — even if not the BBC.

Defenders of the status quo argue that there are many benefits to paying the TV licence of £154.50 a year. The world-class drama and objective news reporting are just the tip of the iceberg, they point out: the BBC represents the best of Britain, an outward-looking institution devoted to high journalistic standards and spreading freedom.

Those are good arguments, yet it still amounts to a pragmatic case for a regressive tax and since when is it progressive to support a flat tax, one that criminalises the most vulnerable in our society, simply because they watch a live CNN broadcast on their mobile device? It is a law that fast appears out of date, out of touch and out of order.

So let us ringfence the BBC’s world-class news and current affairs programmes, perhaps funded by a progressive licence fee, while charging a monthly subscription for entertainment and music. It should never be a criminal offence for refusing to pay for entertainment that one does not consume; that is deeply illiberal.

At this juncture, resisting change can only be done by mounting a nostalgic defence of the status quo, but nostalgia is the last refuge for people who have run out of arguments. British culture in 2020 is a great deal more discerning, independent, and divergent than it has ever been; a digital era no longer requires a deadweight institute from the analogue age.

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'Fake news' is old hat in Northern Ireland

By Douglas Murray

Like millions of people across the country, in the past couple of years I have begun paying for private subscription services, since when, I cannot recall the last BBC drama that I watched. The days of having to pay a licence because there was no other choice seem long-distant; maintaining that system seems an anachronism.

If — as I am often tempted to do — I were to refuse to pay my TV licence as a matter of principle, while readily admitting to watching non-BBC live TV on multiple devices, and announced this very publicly and openly over my social media channels, perhaps even via a live broadcast on one of my digital platforms, would progressives support my potential criminalisation for that refusal? Would they support my imprisonment— which is still a punishment for those who refuse to pay up? I should be incredibly surprised.

The licence fee is simply unfair, unprogressive and unsustainable. It belongs firmly in the top-down world of the last century. The BBC saw us through two world wars, and was there back when we sorely needed it. During our Darkest Hour, our national psyche, our culture and our national morale were spurred on by this all-unifying, singular British broadcast.

Well, job done. Thank you very much, Aunty. But isn’t it time we all moved on.

1) That every party will have some policies you don’t like.
2) Every party will also have rogue members, or leaders, who have said nasty things.
3) Usually, if a party has policies you disagree with, you simply don’t vote for them.

For Britain’s Jews and their allies and friends, however, the issue with the Labour Party is none of the above. Some smart people out there don’t see this because they have been hoodwinked by dishonest political hacks, or are simply too tribal to accept that something abnormal is going on with one of our major parties.

But, and I repeat, the problem with Labour is none of the above and Corbyn’s supporters need to stop obfuscating, strawmanning and deflecting. The issue is that the Labour Party stands accused of being institutionally anti-Semitic — and racist.

This is very different from finding individual policies you hate, or representatives who utter bigotry. For a body to be institutionally racist (ironically, a phrase coined by a Labour government inquiry in the Nineties) not every member is necessarily a racist, nor even necessarily is the leader. Intention and individual behaviour aren’t the primary issue, but rather outcomes are also considered. If the totality of this body’s procedures, institutions and structure lead to racist outcomes, then sincerity and individual intent is no defence.

This is why the Labour government’s 1999 McPherson Inquiry (rightly) deemed the Metropolitan police to be “institutionally racist” after the unpunished racist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. They were not calling all police officers racist. Nor did it mean that other UK organisations didn’t suffer racism too.

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Jeremy Corbyn's Labour would crush civil society

By Roger Scruton

Today, British Jews and their allies are accusing this Labour Party under Corbyn of being “institutionally anti-Semitic”. This means precisely that the party’s mechanisms, procedures and institutions lead to racist outcomes against its Jewish members.

This does not mean that every Labour member is racist. It also does not necessarily imply that even Corbyn is (although he might be). Rather, it points to the failure of Corbyn’s ship, with him as captain, to steer away from anti-Semitism; sincere individual intent is not a condition here.

What British Jews are (correctly) alleging is that the Labour Party discriminates against them, as a party machine, and that the outcomes in that party no longer protect them against racism. This is an institutional failure.

Any instinctive defence, any “Whataboutery” response or or even allegations of hypocrisy — like “why aren’t you doing more to address racism in your own party?” — all entirely miss the nature and seriousness of what is accurately alleged.

British Jews and their allies are not in a state of alarm because Labour has individual racists in it (which is bad enough as it is). No. The Tories, Lib Dem’s, Brexit party others all have bad apples.

The issue very precisely and seriously is that, under Corbyn, Labour seems not only to have ignored the problem, or denied it, but in many cases doubled down on it and — worse still — even blamed the victims for reporting it. In other words: the Labour Party machine has been co-opted by racism.

If one understands the nature and seriousness of the allegations, then one would never reply by saying, by way of example: “but what about Johnson and niqabi Muslim letterboxes?” It was a bad thing to say, but not evidence that the Tory party machine discriminates against Muslim members.

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What if everyone loses this election?

By James Kirkup

It’s also very important to recognise that criticising ultra-conservative Muslim dress is a political right, because the “choice” to adopt fundamentalist dress is a valid societal choice that must equally be subjected to scrutiny — like any religious conservativism must be.

No. Racism is not the same as criticising my religious choices, or lack thereof. You can (politely) criticise my religion, because it’s an idea, and all ideas must be scrutinised. But one cannot insult another’s race, without being rightly deemed a racist.

Jews are both a people and a religion. European anti-Semitic tropes against Jews concern their supposed habits as a “people”, not their religion. It is indeed racism to suggest that all Jews are secret greedy capitalists, for example, as several party members have been found saying.

On the Israel issue, no serious Jewish voice or organisation has ever said it’s racist to criticise the country. This is a complete strawman. I criticise Netanyahu’s policies regularly and know many Jews and Israelis who do so too.

The issue is about four things.

1) Traditional European antisemitism flooding back into Labour, illustrated by the east London “Freedom for Humanity” mural that Corbyn defended, and which perpetuated ideas about Jewish world domination.

2) Holding Israel’s Jews to a higher standard than the rest of the world.

3) An obsessive focus on Israel for errors that are far worse elsewhere.

4) Supporting or otherwise praising genocidal, Jew-murdering terrorist groups.

There are numerous examples of all four of these, and plenty of evidence to be found.

People like Baroness Warsi totally miss the point. The Tory peer seems to have made a career of late deflecting the anti-Semitism issue in Labour by attacking her own party instead over “Islamophobia” (sic).

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For Germans and Jews, the past is never over

By Paul Morland

Yet Boris Johnson, or any rogue Tory MP or member, can and do say racist or borderline racist things, but does the party with a Muslim-origin Chancellor really discriminate against Muslims institutionally? Does it then double down and deny its racism?

This Muslim believes not, and I have never voted Tory in my life, and will not do so this time either. There are problems in the Conservative Party, yes. I disagree with them, yes. But they are yet to meet the test of being institutionally anti-Muslim.

The comparison of Tory anti-Muslim bigotry would only be appropriate if Boris Johnson had called the Neo-Nazi Christchurch killer his “friend” and had taken money, personally, from a state that funded that killer.

If Johnson, Jo Swinson, or anyone other party leader, let alone individual MPs, had shared a panel in Parliament with members of the now banned terrorist group National Action, almost all of us would be disgusted by now.

Yet Corbyn not only shared platforms with Jew-killing Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists, he not only called them friends, but took anything up to £20,000 from their sponsor, the Holocaust-denying theocratic dictatorship of Iran. Now…imagine you’re Jewish, and then imagine Corbyn in No.10 as PM. Precisely

Until the day that Boris Johnson flirts with actual Muslim-killing terrorists it’s disgusting to draw such analogies, because they are deeply insensitive to our Jewish friends. What’s also disgustingly insensitive is to compare any policy of the Israeli state with a terror group

Truth is, there is only one major political party right now that has had senior former cabinet members resign over this alleged institutional racism. There is only one party that is being investigated by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission over said racism. That party is Labour.

After the Holocaust, we vowed in Europe Never Again — then Bosnia happened. Europe is not immune to repeat offending. We must never be too arrogant to think we are. Brexit or Remain, we do have choices other than Labour. We must not betray our Jewish cousins over a tribal vote

After all this, if we still choose Labour, at least let’s stop pretending we are “progressives”, or that we care about racism and minorities or that we “listen to victims when they tell us we’re hurting them”. It’s all BS.

Just admit that you really don’t give a damn about Jews.