We are just one working week into 2026, but it feels very much longer.
The US has invaded a country illegally and seized its president.
The rule of international law would, for all practical purposes, appear to have come to an end and, for all the faults in that system, that matters.
NATO looks to be life-expired, and whilst that might pave the way for something better, it is still significant.
The fates of Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland and, maybe, Canada are all hanging in the balance of a madman who claims that the only constraint on him is his morality when most of us are struggling to think he has any.
A clearly innocent woman in Minneapolis has been shot dead in the street and, rather than condemn this, the US administration, and most especially the vice-president, have claimed that she was part of a national left-wing conspiracy to oppose the government, offering that as justification for her murder when no such justification is ever possible, legally or morally, in a country and a world where the right to hold contrary political opinion is supposedly upheld by the law.
In amongst all this, the UK provided facilities for the US to seize a Russian flagship in international waters off Scotland, and provided naval support to an act which looked very much like piracy. In political terms, this very clearly implies that our government supports the USA in the actions it is taking, making this an issue of domestic concern in the UK and of particular political concern in Scotland, from where the planes flew.
The list could go on, and on. My point, however, does not require me to continue it. Instead, the reason for noting all these things is to highlight that we are living in a world that is now very dangerous, out of control, and, frankly, frightening.
There is every reason to feel at risk as a consequence of what is happening. The history of fascism shows that those who support that ideology, which is best described as rule by a few for their benefit at cost to the people they govern, have little or no regard for those who oppose their opinion, as they very clearly evidenced by killing Renee Good this week. There is no reason to presume that things will get better, or to think that what the US does now might not happen here in the not-too-distant future, given the normal patterns of transferred behaviour from that country to us that we have observed over many decades.
All this requires that I take time to think about what to do next, taking into account the risks that exist. That is what I propose to do today.
It will, quite soon, look like I am bird watching, and I will undoubtedly be out in the open, with a pair of binoculars around my neck, except when I might be having a coffee, but will I necessarily be able to avoid thoughts of a world that is very, very mad as a consequence of the actions of Donald Trump, which are now getting worse than anything I anticipated, this quickly, even though I entirely accurately described him as a fascist seeking to destroy democracy from time long before it became popular to do so?
I am not sure I will be able to avoid those thoughts, because we now have the reality of that prediction coming true to face.
How, then, do we live with a nagging fear of fascism, and the fact that our government, and so many other governments, and so few commentators, appear willing to call this fascism when its very obvious impact already exists all around us? That is the question I need to consider.
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Buy me a coffee!
All this will pass. The higher the sun rises, the closer it approaches its setting.
Sure, it will pass.
But will we get to see the sunrise? That is the question.
An aside for Saturday about bird watching.
General Sir Alan Brooke was Chief of Imperial General Staff during most of world war two. He spent, as he put it, much of his time arguing Churchill out of ‘madcap ideas’. To the PM’s credit, he never over ruled Brooke. He came from an Anglo-Irish family in Ulster. He is under rated.
His life long hobby was ornithology. When visiting Stalin, he took time off to observe the bird life around the Kremlin observed by baffled NKVD (later KGB ) agents. He also contradicted Stalin which earned an amused acknowledgment from the dictator.
He retired after the war. Former colleagues like Eisenhower and de Gaulle became Presidents of their countries. Brooke became President of the London Zoological Society and Vice-president of the RSPB 1949-61.
His son Tom -he insisted on being addressed as such-was a mature student at my Teacher training college. He had been an army officer during the war. We had a couple of conversations and I take some pleasure in the memory of him saying he enjoyed the conversation with me -whatever it was about.
I read about the general a few years ago and looked him up. Sadly, Tom died only four years after I left the college.
Enjoy the day.
Good story. Thank you. On the lookout for water rail right now.
I’m certain I’m not alone in this view which is that the Orange One (Clementine C**t) wants to cancel the mid-terms on the basis of national security and his actions domestically appear designed to give him (in his deranged mind) the justification for dong so.
The question is will he ever stop both domestically and internationally. What is the end goal? Does he have an end goal? Or is it just to keep going and keep going and keep going?
Craig
Those who lust power always wants more power
A sensible reason indeed to have a highly devolved system which also includes less of life being decided by politics.
All of life is political. The need is to get the politics right
Craig Sykes, in the United States, elections are held in the states. The mid term elections do not involve a presidential election. It is less probable than probable that the president could cancel any state’s mid term election.
More to the point, however, is that the USA is currently in the beginning of civil war. The governor of Minnesota has ordered the National Guard into action to prevent the federal ICE agents from conducting escapades of any sort in Minnesota. The governor of Oregon is looking into a similar course of action.
In the larger scheme of things, whatever the EU or UK might wish, the era of the US is over and will not come back. The world relied on the military, financial, legal, and cultural weight of the US more than most people understood. Europeans became reliant on the US for strategic thinking; now, I assume you all have realized that as a result, you all are in much danger. You all will never trust the US again. And how do we make NATO work again, or the World Trade Organization? It’s over for the US. We are no longer the necessary great power.
I accept three things
One, you face civil war
Two, you live in a dictatorship right now, that is however deeply unpopular
Three, this has massive implications for us in a great many ways, including those you note
I fear you may be right. State and federal military/paramilitary units could well come to blows with military/paramilitary units, which would be civil war by most definitions. I also think the billionaires backing MAGA will never give up power democratically.
But I also fear MAGA could be forcing the pace of this deliberately to justify further crackdowns. Trump’s approval ratings are still shockingly too high: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/president-donald-trumps-current-approval-120151406.html
It would be “better” (sorry, not really the correct word, this is all horrible) to delay until the impact of cuts to healthcare subsidies are felt and MAGA/GOPs interference with the mid-terms (gerrymandering, voter suppression, putting troops on the streets in blue states etc) becomes an undeniable attack on democracy.
The most worrying developments are in the US. But it’s not all rosy here either, is it? Some more thoughts:
1. Executive dominance over Parliament.
Fascist systems emerge when legislatures become sidelined rather than abolished. In the UK, the growing use of secondary legislation, fast-tracked bills, and weak scrutiny reduces Parliament’s capacity to restrain executive power.
2. Law-and-order moral panic.
Authoritarian politics often expand by exaggerating disorder. The framing of protest, migration, and asylum as existential threats mirrors how early fascist movements justified coercive responses as “necessary to restore order.”
3. Criminalisation of dissent.
The Nazis initially constrained protest through legal means before suppressing it outright. UK laws expanding police powers over protest, especially vague standards such as “serious disruption”, risk chilling lawful opposition rather than protecting public safety.
4. Degradation of truth and accountability.
Fascism thrives when truth becomes instrumental. Persistent ministerial misinformation, weak consequences for breaches of standards, and attacks on “activist lawyers” or independent watchdogs undermine norms of honesty rather than law itself.
5. Hostility to independent institutions.
Early fascist regimes attacked judges, civil servants, and regulators as obstacles to the “will of the people.” In the UK, courts, the BBC, the civil service, and the Electoral Commission have increasingly been portrayed as partisan or obstructive.
6. National identity as exclusion.
Fascism reframes citizenship as cultural loyalty rather than legal status. UK rhetoric that contrasts “hard-working people” with migrants, protesters, or rights-claimants echoes this narrowing of who counts as fully legitimate.
7. Permanent crisis framing.
Emergency politics is a classic authoritarian accelerator. Brexit, migration, and culture-war issues are repeatedly framed as crises requiring exceptional measures, normalising rule-stretching as routine governance.
8. Weakening of ethical guardrails.
Fascism does not begin with tyranny but with tolerance of misconduct. The erosion of ministerial standards that we’ve seen, and the politicisation of enforcement signal that power, not principle, is becoming decisive.
Bottom line.
The UK remains a pluralist democracy with strong residual protections. But democracies fail gradually, not dramatically. The worrying signs are not tanks or salutes, but the quiet downgrading of restraint, truth, and accountability. History suggests those are precisely the conditions in which darker systems take root if left unchecked.
Thank you for sharing your palpable fear.
And you were not alone in calling Trump out very early on either – Snyder / Belton / Kendzior / Burgis etc., and others have raised this but to no avail. We also know that Neo-liberalism with it’s shop window talk of being ‘pro-market’ is anything but and actually a monopolist mindset that is comfortably aligned with authoritarian politics.
Fascism and Neo-liberalism are made for each other.
In many ways we are actually living in an epiphany of sorts – the increasingly shameless shredding of decency, restraint and empathy has at least for me proven beyond doubt that rather than living in some benign age, we have actually been presiding over a very weak system that cannot actually contain raw power. I find some grim satisfaction in that but it is not enough, there is no feeling of triumph I assure you. But raw power with menaces is what is happening. Threats are being made, new means to power bad ideas are among us and move very fast. And the corrupting power of money is everywhere.
What I do know is that people like Trump and his acolytes is that at some stage they over reach themselves – their own belligerence brings them down, they over reach because they believe too much in themselves – their lack of modesty will be their undoing, their fanaticism. It is important to continue to have faith in what you are doing.
The biggest problem is ignorance – which is always the redoubt of the possibility and realization of any evil. You are doing your bit, hopefully helped by these interactions and others.
At heart is another problem and I think Thomas Hobbes enunciated the most and the best. He accepted as a fact that human beings had the capacity to be very bad. He was right about that – to confront it. But he saw it as a weakness I think. In accepting it, his appeal seemed to me about how to manage that, anticipate it better, to live with our dark side present with us at all times and manage that as judiciously as we can. That to me is real Liberalism. All I see is our dark side being given the benefit of the doubt over and over again.
Thanks, PSR. Appreciated. I like that interpretation of Hobbes.
Pilgrim you say “their own belligerence brings them down, they over reach because they believe too much in themselves – their lack of modesty will be their undoing, their fanaticism. It is important to continue to have faith in what you are doing.”
I have often said evil will trip itself up. I mentioned the bird watching General Alan Brooke earlier. He and George Marshall, his American opposite number, often had furious rows but would resolve them in the interest of the common cause. The Nazi leadership was competitive and fractured (e.g. which stopped some new weapons reaching the front ) and many were there through sycophancy. The people around Trump in this administration remind me very much of the Nazi hierarchy. Look at Stephen Miller, , Kennedy, Hegsith, or Musk and you see a lack of empathy and scruples and massive ego. It distances them from reality as well as principle.
It is very clear to me, and possibly many others that there are now several fascist regimes in the world that I’m aware of. I include USA, Russia, Iran, China, Hungary, Belarus. All of these are close to full-on fascism; many other sovereign states are adopting an approach that can take them in the same direction. There is so much danger in this that it’s hard to know where to start. We know how it can end because we’ve been there countless times in our history. You don’t have to be a history scholar to be aware of how inhumane many of the previous incarnations of fascism have been. I recently read Simon Seabag Montefiore’s excellent World History and was struck by the patterns of inhumanity inflicted on populations by cruel, sadistic rulers and their officials.
I fear it is all about to be repeated with the loss of countless lives. I agree that all we can do as ordinary citizens is to call it out whenever we see it, especially in our own backyard, and think about what else we can do.
” and the fact that our government, and so many other governments, and so few commentators, appear willing to call this fascism”
I struggled to make sense of this sentence. Did you mean
“…our government, and so many other governments, ……appear *un*willing to call this fascism”?
The ‘so few commentators’ sounds as though it belongs with a different sentence such as ‘Few commentators are willing to call this fascism”
Apologies for being nitpicky
All I can say is, my sentence makes sense to me. It means people will not call out fascism.
Trump in an interview this week with the New York Times when asked are there “any limits to your global power”?
The reply?
“My own morality, my own mind, it’s the only thing that can stop me”.
It is difficult to see how Trump and his cronies are going to be stopped.
P.S. On the subject of birding……….
Big frost in Derbyshire overnight. We have a bird bath in the garden – hard frozen water in it. ‘Was looking out the window to see a sparrow tapping on the frozen water and the seemingly making direct eye contact with me rather reproachfully.
Said human boiled a kettle, filled the bird bath with hot water, the ice melted. Result 1: Sparrow and its mate took turns to have a bath – human family watched delighted through the window, so enthralled, forgot to get the DSLR out. Result 2: Good feelings all around, nice organic memory, good principles going forward into 2026.
🙂
I am much refreshed by a morning birding – including pink foot geese and tundra bean geese. Good goosing keeps me happy.
In response to the Trump’s administrations talk of the “Iron Law” of power politics, of might being right, I think we need to remind everyone that, especially in a nuclear armed world (which is precisely why attempts to build a rules based order followed on from the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) there is really only one Iron Law:
https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/is-there-a-universal-morality/
This year should be of concern to the Scots . The foreign english government gave permission to the foreign American government to land troops on our country… so they could attack a another foreign nation…without a word to the Scottish Government let alone asking permission of…and making a battlefield of Scotland by association. If that isn’t disrespect I don’t know what is. Now we have an American battleship in Faslane where nuclear weapons were dumped by the foreign english government regardless of our objections.
Independence is paramount to the Scots this year. Not a good year approaching for the UK.
To Cliff B at 10.59, I agree with your paragraphs 1. to 8., but not with your statement that “The UK remains a pluralist democracy”. It never has been, and never will be, unless the unelected chamber of the UK Parliament – the House of Lords – is abolished. Generations of UK voters have been brainwashed by politicians and journalists to believe that the UK is a democracy.
If I’m not mistaken Harold Wilson refused to send British troops to fight in Vietnam. That can’t have been easy but does suggest it is possible for British politicians to stand up to powerful allies when needed.
Maybe someone can bottle the Harold Wilson backbone and sell it in and around the streets of Westminster.
Correct, and agreed
I agree that Wilson kept the UK out of Vietnam (even the Australians ended up there) but at what cost, what backbone?
Wilson also I think sold one the UK’s Indian ocean islands to the Americans in exchange for cheap Polaris missiles? Some of the locals were summarily displaced – the Chagos Island or something – and living conditions got worse for them. There is still a dispute.
https://theweek.com/politics/the-chagos-agreement-explained
Wilson also did little to stem the burgeoning financial muscle that led to mergers and acquisitions for asset stripping the UK’s industrial base, rather than proper investment and modernisation (something my family were personally affected by).
I mention this because not only do I think that Wilson was over rated (I’m sure he wasn’t much of an economist) and seemed more pushed along by events, but it once again shows us the real nature of post war peace was driven by U.S. wants and needs. Saying no to the U.S. always seemed to have consequences? My view is that should not be the case.
I’m sure you’re right. Most of what I know about Harold Wilson comes from watching clips of The Crown on TikTok. Nevertheless he did keep us out of Vietnam. That would have taken courage. And many British lives that would have been traumatised were not.