Jonathan Brown

I just had a very disturbing Good Friday encounter with an ICE agent at the airport As I was going through security, an ICE agent asked me for my ID. I told him this isn’t Soviet Russia and that the only citizenship papers I planned to show him were the Declaration of Independence “Sir, I’m just asking for ID, not proof of citizenship,” he said. “Today is the anniversary of Jesus’s resurrection,” I replied. “He was an American. Would you have asked to see his papers too? Would the scars on his hands not have been enough for you?” He was stunned silent. I strode past him without showing my ID and went through the metal detector I received a standing ovation

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

A transgender political campaigner and activist in Scotland has pleaded guilty to creating AI-generated sexual images of children. Amelia Connolly, 23, has since told his social media followers that the conviction was a misunderstanding. He is set to be sentenced in May.

Judge was Daniel Sternberg. Sternberg is a board member of the movement for Reform Judaism, which elects Rabbis for the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Reform Judaism’s website shows clear links to ‘Israel’. Sternberg previously dismissed a case against Tommy Robinson.

There was a time when condoms were available only on prescription in Ireland… (Little-known fact: I was once the Durex PR man…)

The mentality of “let’s make things so bad for women that they drop out of workforce altogether and then just have kids instead” is both stupid and counterproductive And across most counties women who work are more likely to have kids than those not employed

remembering the time i answered the phone at the daily record and a woman said “settle an argument - is the april fool story the bendy chocolate or that cunt getting hit in the face with a goose.”