Welcome to Perspective’s newsletter, our view on what’s been happening over the past week, bringing you some of the best independent writing on current affairs, culture, history and life in general. (If this email has been forwarded, you can subscribe here).

Horses of the Apocalypse?

Even London cabbies seemed shaken after two blood-streaked, riderless horses galloped for miles along the streets of London this week. “The only worse thing,” said one, as he dropped me off in Islington, “would be if all the ravens left the Tower of London”. Quite a few otherwise rational souls (like the BBC’s Tom Sutcliffe) tweeted that the beasts could be viewed as portents. I was slightly inclined that way myself, having just put out a “Fire and Ice” issue of Perspective looking at existential risk , AI , and ancient Mayan prophecy that predicted the end of days.

Maybe the idea of portents isn’t totally far-fetched. I once watched a talk given by Meg Rosoff, author of How I Live Now, who said riding a horse is akin to the relationship between the conscious, decision-making part of the brain and the creative forces emanating from the subconscious. A rider may feel in charge but there must be a sympathetic “flow” between human and mount, with the horse representing the more primal parts of the self. If the synergy is disrupted then the beast may get skittish, or buck you off, just as subconscious urges can send people awry. 

It’s clear the “flow” between the Household Cavalry mounts and their riders was sundered on Wednesday, following a crash from falling concrete nearby. The initial incident at Horse Guards Parade involved five horses and another King’s Guard (in a far less reported incident) was thrown from his horse on the parade later in the day. I have sympathy for those wayward equines. At a time of talk of WWIII and non-stop assaults on the planet’s natural habitats, I feel spooked too. It’s tempting to run for the hills, but I’ll probably just track down some tea leaves, or entrails, and look for signs of something more cheerful – like a spot of sun, or a credible Home Secretary. 

I protest! I protest!

What did you do to mark St George’s Day? I stole a Mini Cooper, filled it with Morris dancers and drove to a village pub in Norfolk so we could observe the annual witch-dunking and vicar-tossing. Then we retired to a thatched cottage to watch The Dam Busters on loop until the National Anthem was played on Radio Four. It seemed marginally less absurd than travelling to Whitehall wrapped in England flags to yell “I want my country back” in the company of Laurence Fox, Tommy Robinson and some Millwall fans. Back from where, you wonder? The Bermuda Triangle? A chasm in the space-time continuum à la Christopher Nolan? Or maybe from the 3rd century AD, which was round about when St George, a Christian convert, was martyred.

You wonder if those who marched on 23 April knew our patron saint wasn’t English, but a Roman officer, raised in Turkey with a mum from Syria-Palestine. Nationalist protestors are using the banner of a Middle Eastern bloke to protest that England has been snatched away from them.

And no sane person should want to suppress them. Fox’s right to lionise St George is part and parcel of someone’s right to protest the bloodshed in Gaza and another’s to march against anti-Semitism. Peaceful protest is one of our most precious democratic rights. So, Suella Braverman’s 2023 legislation scuppering the “wrong” sort of protest (too noisy or involving “locking-on” like the Suffragettes) is the worst blow to civil liberties for decades. The most chilling part is its pre-emptive nature: you can now be arrested if you’re deemed likely to cause a nuisance. It’s up there with Orwellian thought crimes: “I’m putting you into detention, Nigel Molesworth, because you look as if you’re going to pelt ink at me.”

Why would anyone protest unless they wanted to disrupt and jolt people out of complacency? We’re already seeing where this lunacy ends – with people like retired GP Sarah Benn serving prison time and suspended by the GMC because she breached a civil injunction to join Just Stop Oil protests at Kingsbury. IMHO she should be made a dame for challenging the rapacious fossil fuel industry, just as Perspective columnist Hannah Bourne-Taylor should for protesting the rapid dwindling of the UK’s swift population. The fact she protests in a nude bodystocking may be the only reason she’s not in the dock. We Brits love a streaker. I wonder if all would-be disrupters should take a leaf from the Lady Godiva protest book.

Behind Netanyahu’s attack on US students 

Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy, was right: “In war, truth is the first casualty”. So I couldn’t help but wonder if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was trying to get World War III started this week, when he took time away from Israel’s tit-for-tat exchange with Iran to denounce the US campus protests. He railed they were “reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s” and warned of the “conflagration to come”. The UK and US media mostly played along, even though Jewish student groups were actively involved in the demonstrations and rejected Netanyahu’s charges of antisemitism, and – based on the evidence circulating on social media – any violence seemed mostly on the part of the police. 

Meanwhile, speculation that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is planning to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and other members of his war cabinet was reported extensively across Asia and the Middle East, but largely ignored in the West. According to Keshet 12, Israel’s most watched commercial TV channel, Netanyahu’s outburst followed the decision by the country’s National Security Council last Thursday to drum up Western support against any move by the ICC to indict Netanyahu, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and Defence Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi. 

Netanyahu is of course no stranger to the criminal courts. He already faces up to ten years imprisonment in his own country if convicted in three cases filed against him in 2019 for fraud, bribery and breach of trust. These form the backdrop to his long but (so far) failed campaign to gain political control over the Israeli judiciary – currently the only real check on the executive power he wields because of his slim majority in the Knesset. If international charges are brought, however, they’ll escalate Netanyahu’s legal woes to an altogether different level. Even if they’re ignored by Israeli authorities (Israel is not a member of the ICC) he’ll find that with foreign travel options limited, there’s little escape from protestors closer to home. Tens of thousands have already taken to the streets to demand his resignation.

Read more about Israel-Palestine on our website:

Return of the F-word

Stay with me on this, but Netanyahu’s outburst this week reminded me of a time many years ago when as a budding bard I discovered – the hard way – that certain words are unofficially banned in poetry. The three I recall were “shard”, “myriad” and “tesserae”. I confess to being guilty of the first two, but don’t think I ever resorted to rhyming the third in a couplet with “segue” or “swordplay”. I’ve since discovered that journalism has similar redlines concerning political labels. Use of the word “fascist” and making modern comparisons with the Nazis and Hitler, have rightly long been considered lazy and unworthy of the printer’s ink. But it’s impossible to avoid the fact that, since the global financial crisis, increasingly extreme populist agendas have gained ground around the world while liberal democracies have undergone a steady decomposition.

Civil liberties are increasingly under threat. Polarisation has only deepened in the wake of covid and the weakening of western economies, which has seen millions pushed into poverty. This has provided fertile ground for politicians like Donald Trump, whose rise has coincided with the F-word being thrown around far more freely, especially in America. Former Labour Secretary in the US under President Clinton, Robert Reich, even released a video recently, describing how Trump’s tactics and rhetoric follow the same five-point playbook that saw the dictators of the 1930s come to power. Number one on his list is “rejection of the rule of law… in favour of a strongman who interprets popular will”. Undeterred, this week Trump took time away from his own “hush-money” trial to double-down on his promise to free those convicted of violence in the 6 January riot, and to insist that “very powerful presidential immunity [from criminal prosecution] is imperative” if he is to “get things done” upon his return to power. Now there’s not a myriad of ways of interpreting that. 

Book of the Week

Pariah Genius by Iain Sinclair
Cheerio Publishing
£19.99

No one is better at raising the ghosts of London neighbourhoods than psychogeographer Iain Sinclair: “All I know is that place dictates the story”. The 80-year-old author and filmmaker passionately believes all timelines exist simultaneously, so to read Pariah Genius, Sinclair’s novelised biography of the photographer John Deakin (famed for capturing Francis Bacon’s intimate circle) is to teleport to Soho of the mid-20th century and walk alongside publand’s meanest drunk. George Melly once described Deakin as a man “of such inventive malice and implacable bitchiness, it’s surprising he didn’t choke on his own venom.” Even so, his images are the finest, most piercing record we have of that legendary milieu. As Sinclair points out, Deakin’s portrait of Dylan Thomas, half-submerged in a graveyard, is proof enough of his exceptional eye. If you’re intrigued by bohemians, the cost of artistic genius and admire the novels of Patrick Hamilton, this brilliant volume is essential reading.