Alex

It is painful to watch the Shinner trolls having a go at @yuanyi_z simply because he is pointing out – dispassionately and without comment – some facts. Bertrand Russell astutely observed in a 1937 essay that people tend wrongly to confuse victimhood with virtue. Our own age puts an even higher value than Russell’s on being downtrodden. By tapping into this sense, Irish nationalists capture the mood of the times. Yet they also perpetrate a falsehood. There is a reason that no one ever called it the English Empire. During the 18th century, perhaps 30,000 English people settled in the Atlantic colonies, as against 75,000 Scots and 250,000 Irish. Many were pushed into emigration by poverty, of course, but numerous others were younger sons of the gentry or of professional families, seeking their fortune as planters. “Throughout the Empire,” writes the historian Kevin Kenny, “Irish Catholics served as soldiers and administrators, or worked as policemen, doctors, engineers, lawyers, journalists, or businessmen.” In 1830, when Ireland accounted for around 30 per cent of the UK’s population, it supplied (according to a study by Peter Karsten) 42 per cent of the soldiers in the British Army. Ireland also provided around half the East India Company’s recruits prior to the 1857 Mutiny. When, following that bloody business, the Crown assumed more or less direct control of India, Irishmen were no less prominent in the new administration. Universities in Cork, Galway and Belfast offered courses in Indian languages, history and geography, as did Trinity College Dublin. It wasn’t long before some English officials were grumbling that the Indian Civil Service was run by and for Irishmen. Reginald Dyer, the officer responsible for machine-gunning unarmed protesters in Amritsar in 1919, is vaguely remembered as an unfeeling English toff. In fact he was born in Punjab to an Irish father and educated in Co Cork. The Lieutenant-Governor who backed him, cracking down on the protests that followed the atrocity, was Michael O’Dwyer, a Catholic from Co Tipperary. O’Dwyer was a Home Ruler. Like most of his countrymen at the time, he saw greater Irish autonomy as perfectly compatible with participation in a global imperium. Before the horrors of 1916, most Irish nationalists backed John Redmond in wanting “home rule within the Empire”. There were, to be sure, Irish republicans in the colonies, but they were the minority. As Patrick O’Farrell put it in his history of Irish settlement in Australia, most “accepted, indeed took pride in, belonging to Australia and the empire, readily incorporating God Save the King into their annual St Patrick’s Day festivities”. None of this should be remotely surprising. Between 1801 and 1921, the years when the Empire expanded and became institutionalised, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom with representation at Westminster. None of the contemporary theorists of imperialism, including Lenin and Bukharin, saw it as a colony. Of course, many Irish Catholics suffered at this time from both legal and unofficial discrimination. It might not have been colonial oppression; but it was still oppression. And, as the psychologists Daniel Wegner and Kurt Gray have shown, we tend to categorise people as either oppressors or oppressed, agents or patients, doers or done-to. We struggle to see that all nations, like all people, are in both categories. Still, having suffered individually (as my own Irish Catholic ancestors did) does not make you a colony, let alone prevent you being a coloniser.

The BBC has found a shadow industry of law firms and advisers is charging thousands of pounds to help migrants pretend to be gay in order to stay in the UK. Politics Investigation correspondent Billy Kenber told #BBCBreakfast about what he found bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

As my friend @NGruen1 said: "If it hadn't been for modernism, the whole of the 20th Century could have looked like that."

ANGRY YOUNG WOMEN by @emilylawford and @Scarlett__Mag It was a Wednesday night and seven members of the University of Leeds’ feminist society had invited me to join their book swap. I asked how they felt about the young men they knew. “I don’t care for them,” said a girl called Ruby imperiously. “They’re not bad people, but they refuse to call out their friends who make other girls uncomfortable. They’ll laugh at jokes that are sexist, racist, homophobic, they don’t care about political issues… I don’t think they like women a lot.” If a man is attracted to you, she said, he might talk about things like toxic misogyny. If he doesn’t fancy you, he won’t bother. “I feel like a lot of it is quite sexually motivated with men.” I asked if they’d consider dating a man with different political views. They all immediately said no. “I don’t think I’d even be friends with one,” said one girl. “They don’t see you as human.” Only one woman, Evelyn, admitted to having male friends (though she was worried this made her a “pick me”, trying too hard for male attention). Evelyn was concerned about what the men she knew were watching online. “The stuff that’s being said about women is crazy,” she said. “They’re getting all these reels, talking about, like, bad stuff about women. And I get reels of women saying bad stuff about men. I try to think, not all men are like this, but…” On the internet, women and men have never been more alienated from each other. While the toxic, often hard-right politics of the manosphere have been exhaustively documented, the new generation of female influencers are nearly as extreme – just on the other side of the political spectrum. The “femosphere” spans a range of tones: there are misandrist dating coaches who urge women to reject men altogether, and more explicitly progressive content creators who cover global and domestic politics. Exclusive polling by Merlin Strategy for the New Statesman reveals that young women, aged between 18 and 30, are by far the most progressive demographic in the UK. Young women are 26 percentage points less likely to feel positively about capitalism than young men, and much less likely to feel the economy works in their favour. Gen Z women are more likely to support causes such as feminism, environmentalism and anti-racism than young men. They also feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them. I spent the last few months in search of the new left-wing young women. It wasn’t difficult – they were everywhere. But it all felt impossibly bleak. They weren’t excited about their futures. They didn’t like the men they knew, or the idea of those they didn’t. Men were just a threat who had the potential to harm or trap them. This will almost certainly make relationships harder: fewer than half of young women feel men understand them. Young women are much less likely than men to date people who disagree with their politics. People will get lonelier, and angrier. Young women are twice as likely to not want children as young men. And it’s getting worse. Women under 25 are most likely to believe things are “stacked against me, no matter how hard I try”. A significant majority of young women feel isolated from the rest of the country. The two main political parties aren’t reaching out to them specifically. Many women told me they feared a Reform government pressuring them to have babies. Many say they will vote for the Greens in the upcoming local elections, but few seem to believe that will make a difference. They don’t feel represented by mainstream politics, and they don’t think anyone cares. Cover art by Carl Godfrey

@HoeMcAdams Ireland was an imperial power.

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