The UK To Recognise Palestine
If one has to praise Sir Keir Starmer for anything these days, and there is not much apart from the wilfully destructive brand of socialism which has been delivered, it is that he is set to be true to his word regarding recognising Palestine. He warned in July that if Israel did not deescalate the military force against Palestine, he would move to recognise the troubled territory in September. Alas, unlike President Trump’s deadlines to President Putin regarding Ukraine, which have been conveniently forgotten, Starmer has been foolish enough to press ahead. But the foolishness seems to be on all sides of what he is doing: from the son of the Palestine leader himself suggesting that the state would never exits, to all those on the right who still back Israel, including Trump. That 9 out of 10 in this country (a JL Partners survey) do not back recognising Palestine is obviously not a problem to someone who has spent the whole of his premiership consistently being unable to read the room.
Of course, there is more. As we were reminded during the state visit of the American President this week, we have a leader who has the authority of sitcom character Frank Spencer, in a country whose government is doing whatever it can to eliminate not only any last vestiges of past greatness, but even the flag as symbolic of British patriotism. There is some irony that the UK government is so keen to recognise the rights of the Palestinian people, but increasingly lackadaisical at home. Even worse, there have been reports that granting statehood to Palestine could deliver a massive reparations claim regarding the 100 years of post Balfour Declaration pain that has been suffered by those in the region. The bill has been put at £2tln, something which could mean that it is more than pensioners going cold at Christmas in terms of cuts in public spending. But after Chagos we know the government likes this kind of challenge.
Anyone watching Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy waxing lyrical regarding the reasons for backing the Palestinian cause not being a reward for October 7, or terrorism may have been able to see where he was coming from, especially in the wake of the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza. Unfortunately, the crisis in terms of the gesture is that the UK no longer has the geopolitical teeth to make any gesture on its own, even if it were to be one that could lead to peace.
Robert Redford 1936-2025
One of the pluses and minuses of being in the latter stages of middle age at this time, is that those who pass away in the generation above, tend to be those who one remembers at their peak. The late Gene Hackman was a good example of this. Robert Redford’s career was at its zenith between 1969’s Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kind and arguably up to Indecent Proposal in 1993. In the meantime he won a director Oscar for 1980’s Ordinary People, and set up the Sundance Festival.
In terms of what he did in his era he was at the pinnacle both at the box office, but also as one of American cinema’s thinkers and commentators. This is a dimension you rarely see today with the next generation of stars, be they Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, or George Clooney, and certainly not the younger generation in their 20s and 30s. All they need are a couple of well rehearsed (funny) anecdotes on Graham Norton and it is job done. Part of this is due to mystique being eroded due to over exposure, and part of it, the “Netflixisation” of film making and story telling.
Films like All The President’s Men or Three Days of The Condor were also very much of their time, even though the issues involved are arguably even more pressing now than they were then. The Watergate Scandal looks like a vicar’s tea party as compared to the likes of Epstein, or a Stormy Daniels. The paranoid thrillers of the 1970s do not quite have the frizzante of armed police turning up at the front door off the back of a dodgy tweet these days in the UK – allegedly.
All that said, one of the last interviews with Redford on social media tribute reels asked him, a Democrat, what he thought of Trump. The best quote was that he thought that Trump “shakes things up.” This was in the sense of preventing politics from being boring. The most negative was that Redford though that Trump “degrades everything he touches.”
The latter was perhaps the opposite of what Redford achieved in his career, he upgraded everything, made it clever, thoughtful, and something which would resonate. Part of this was his good luck to be around in the 20th century, not the 21st, but a lot of it was the man.
