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Hear me out on this. One way to understand religion is as a belief system built on the purported word of a superior authority, a god, mediated through an inner circle, the priesthood. For a religion to survive, when the word of its god and facts contradict each other, the followers of the religion must align with the former. This explains the prosecution of figures like Galileo, who did no more than state clearly observable facts. The god drives the narrative, describing reality in advance, providing a framework for confirmatory and complementary facts to slot into and for contradictory facts to be discarded as fabrication, misinterpretation or lie. Modern politicians are adept at driving the narrative, telling the story before it happens, providing interpretation guidelines for every ensuing fact. This is the reason why Trump started claiming election fraud weeks before the election happened, or why you can predict reality by expecting the opposite to anything stated by Michael Gove ...

We are a few weeks away from the end of the EU withdrawal transition period, and a new YouGov poll tells us that 51% of Brits are against Brexit, with 38% still for it. The anti-European sentiment fanned by the populism of Farage and Johnson, Britain’s pied pipers of Hamelin, is receding. Alas, there is no mechanism for reversal. Even though we know stopping Brexit, remaining, would make us all immediately more prosperous, in the UK and Europe, and more relaxed, and happier, and less ashamed, there is no path for the change of mind. On we march. The Light Brigade. Leonidas’ 300. The wise know not to decide the important in anger, to leave sentiment for leisure. But we were not wise. And the pied pipers keep on playing, leading us to the cliff. We follow, hypnotically , against our will, or rather devoid of will. Tired. Disillusioned. Defeated, after many sang victory songs on referendum day, before we knew the wrong battle had been fought and, vanquished or victors, we all lost  Le...

Mainstream politicians tend to coalesce with the fringes to serve short term aims, accepting coalition with extremists to get to power, expecting them to remain marginal and return to oblivion once it suits the majority partner. The US Senate made this calculation in refusing to hold a serious hearing on impeachment of a rogue, populist and nihilist president, the Spanish PP when bringing Vox into coalition government in Madrid. These miscalculations are frequent in history, each time with the same outcome. Extremists can be marginalised but, once you rescue them from oblivion, you open a Pandora’s box and no longer have the power to put them back in. Once you lend undeserved credibility to their ideas, once you present them as legitimate to the populus and accept anger, hate and animosity in politics, you lose control. Hitler, Caesar, Putin or Mussolini rode these waves, with the initial connivance and later aghast helpless horror of the political establishments they ultimately depose...

One of the defining drivers of nationalistic populist movements coming to the fore in the last few years, not for the first time as history teaches us, is the belief by the working class that immigrants will take their livelihood, lower wages, increase insecurity and crime rates. America First, Brexit, the rise of Vox in Spain or La Lega in Italy all owe their popularity to this idea. This is an amazingly executed subterfuge by an elite that takes more and more of the pie whilst convincing those left with less that they need to fight each other. The tactic is not new. Julius Caesar famously postulated it as a strategy with ‘Divide et Impera’ and Sun Tzu even before him, in ‘The Art of War’. Well, I have news for you. There is absolutely no evidence, whatsoever, that immigrants will do any of this. There is, in fact, some evidence that they will do the opposite, they work harder and engage in crime less than natives and, often, raise wages for locals, who become their supervisors Length...