What’s wrong with liberalism?

I think the question is whether you can imagine a political party, be it an existing party that changes its platform or a new party, that largely reflects your views and is, at least in theory, viable from the standpoint of prevailing public opinion.

Are there enough people who agree with you on enough things to provide sufficient support for a political party that reflects your views and values to a sufficient (for you) degree?

I don’t know the answer, but I don’t think the question is one about a party that’s your perfect match.

I would love to have the problem of being torn over which party’s candidates to vote for in general elections. As it stands, it’s only a matter of whether I’m really voting for someone (D) or if I’m merely voting against their opponent (R).

russell – I’d be interested in knowing how we ended up with (and continue to have) only two meaningful parties, if any of the more poli-sci aware among could explain.

It’s Duverger’s Law. I’ll repost my link from my previous comment for convenience. https://electoral-reform.org.uk/duvagers-law-more-guidelines-than-actual-rules/

Basically, it has to do with the way that our representation is split up and how winners are determined. Our particular system steers the results into a two-party centrist system and it takes a lot of organizing and focused outrage to overcome that inertia.

Whatever the case, I think that Hilton is toast in the general election, and that makes me feel a lot better about the world.

These days, it takes an exceptional** Republican politician, combined with a terrible Democratic candidate, to have any chance of winning statewide. From the early 90s, the California Republican Party worked really hard at becoming a party for far right bigots only. Successfully. This in a state where the demographics are terrible for such candidates, and getting worse.

So yeah, Hilton is probably toast. But personally, I’d feel better about the world if we had two viable parties/candidates to choose between.

** Exceptional meaning not just a very talented politician, but one who is somehow the antithesis of the rest of prominent California Republican officeholders. There are such Republicans at the local level. But if they get even as far as the state legislature, the money to run a campaign isn’t available. Unless they are also rich enough to self-fund.

I have to think the electoral college has something to do with the US having the most pure two-party system. The fact that states’ EC votes are, with very few exceptions, all given to whoever wins at the state level, by whatever margin, rather than apportioned, pushes us towards two-party dominance. That’s on top of our president being publicly elected in the first place rather than determined by which party controls congress.

Presidents are the nominal (or de facto) leaders of their political parties. If presidents are elected in a way that leads to only two major parties, it’s going to flow into the rest of our political systems at all levels. It makes additional parties all the more pointless.

“i think that’s Duverger again…”

Oh, so do I. It’s just something that wasn’t mentioned at nous’s link. And it’s a double dose of it. Once at the state level and again nationally. If not for the EC, it would just be at the national level by popular vote.

(At least the guy who came in 2nd back in the day got to be VP.)

If Steyer does catch Hilton (unlikely, but possible) I’m not sure what that would mean for a Becerra vs. Steyer statewide general election. No idea who the Hilton voters would support, or how many of them would bother to vote.

The more Hilton supporters who stay home**, the fewer nut cases will win local offices. Which are really critical in the long run. And to which the Democrats have an unfortunate history of paying insufficient attention.

** i.e. don’t bother to vote. Vote by Mail has changed the world, but the expression endures.

from GFtNC’s link:

In the early years of the platform, the global wealth tax does most of the work, drawing substantial payments from the world’s billionaires, centimillionaires, and decamillionaires and channeling them into the World Sovereign Fund. The Fund accumulates assets equivalent to about 60% of world GDP, or about 10% of the world capital stock,

yikes

Because country dividends account for a larger share of GDP in the South, and the global rich predominantly come from the North, the Global Justice Platform (GJP) also implies a form of class-based reparatory justice.

…

This suggests that the GJP [Global Justice Project] would need to be scaled up to fully account for historical responsibilities and to better approach universal, equal access to education and health. The scaling up could come from more progressive tax schedules and country dividends, or by direct reparations supplementing universal policies.

the linked paper does admit it might be hard to get the US and China to participate, but says they can probably be induced through tariffs (“corrective tax”). lol.

i can’t see the average worker anywhere being happy about having to pay taxes to a foreign bank in order to fund a redistribution scheme to pay for “historical responsibilities”.

economists are strange folk.

Not if the international tariff agency invests in a fleet of tax class attack submarines armed with less-than-lethal torpedoes (disabling just the propulsion system of blockade runners).
Air transport traffic blockades could be more difficult, if no killing is intended, but shipping would be the bulk anyway.

And, on an entirely different subject (but still just within the heading of liberalism), I don’t know how much non-Brits know about the awful case of the recent murder of Henry Nowak. Briefly, he was a young man who was stabbed several times by a Sikh man, whose brother then called the police to allege that the perpetrator had been the object of a racist attack. When the police arrived, although Nowak was on the floor and kept telling them he had been stabbed and couldn’t breathe, the police didn’t believe him and handcuffed him while he was dying. It will not amaze you to hear that Nigel Farage, Elon Musk, J D Vance et al have been making much hay on this subject.

“We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension… This is not a case about Sikhism. This is not a case about racism. This is a case about murder.”

– Family of Henry Nowak, 1 June

“Henry Nowak died the same way a civilisation dies. Abandoned. Handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit. His murder is as tragic as it is enraging. He should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”

– JD Vance, X, 5 June

I tried to post the link, but that doesn’t really work, and copying and pasting as below loses the graphs and supporting evidence links, which is too bad. But I thought it was still worthwhile to show ObWi this:

The problem is not just the exploitation of a tragedy — it is the fictional picture of Britain that American populists increasingly rely upon.
Fraser Nelson
Jun 05, 2026

The Nowak family’s wish was never going to be respected: the brutal truth is that his death was just too politically rich not to exploit. Elon Musk had long been demanding the release of the police bodycam video shown to the court of Henry’s last moments. It would be Twitter dynamite, as galvanising for the digital right as George Floyd was for the BLM-left. Nothing solicits a more visceral human reaction than seeing, hearing a dying man cuffed by police. Certain politicians will always seek to exploit and direct such emotional reactions: JD Vance very much included.

Vance, the algorithm and the British Gotham
To frame the murder in racial terms – the result of immigration, rather than criminality – is precisely what Henry’s family begged politicians not to do. But his case is vital for JD Vance’s overall message: that British civilisation is somehow under attack because “the mass invasion of migrants” means streets full of murderers and a civilisational threat posed. The problem is that Vance and those on the populist right who promote “Britain is Broken” narrative cannot point to actual crime figures because they show that crime has actually halved – while immigration has doubled.

JD Vance is a smart guy who knows Britain and holidays here – so what’s he up to? Building a domestic MAGA narrative. His style of politics relies on building a narrative of conflict, keeping a rage (and fear) alight. A glance at the US government website, Aliens (‘they walk among us’) gives a sense of this vibe. The MAGA tribe that Vance seeks to lead want to know that “London has fallen” and Europe is ablaze. And Britain, with its Hindu Prime Ministers and Muslim mayors, is now a dumpster-fire of a country with civilisation being “erased” – all because of immigration, enabled by leftists. The target this time is Sikhs, who had until now been spared the treatment reserved for Muslims.

Britain, Vance is saying, is a cautionary tale for America. The barbarians are inside the European gates, and Henry Nowak’s death is an example of what happens when they get in. Pete Hegseth was at it in his D-Day speech – comparing migration to D-Day. Reform UK also draws this ‘invasion’ analogy. A media ecosystem has arisen to promote this narrative 24/7: Twitter nativist accounts like the one Vance cited. They scour Europe for examples of migrant crime and push them out to fuel the narrative of racial conflict or migrant vs native clashes.

The UK version of this is the “Broken Britain” narrative of Reform and you can see the overlap with MAGA (and, in James Orr, their advisers). Vance calls for “righteous anger;” Nigel Farage for “cold rage.” Both tell of racial tension, the attack of the white majority by the criminal minority. The ‘broken’ country Reform speaks of, the dumpster-fire that JD Vance points to, bears no more resemblance to the UK than Gotham City does to New York. But these gentlemen and their media allies are forever building up this picture of British Gotham with fake narratives, fake stats, made-up think tanks and books with concocted quotes.

Social media also craves this material. The more incendiary the post, the greater ‘engagement’. Musk has become a circus-master seeking to lay on a show: that’s why he was baying for the Nowak video. Even without him, the algorithms crave civil-war material. The populists and media networks both work by selling people a worldview, and saying you’ll only get this dope from them. Politically, it’s powerful. But it depends on deceit.

I have written my Times column about the lies being told about the Nowak murder – and the industrial-scale attempt to concoct fake narratives. I’d like to expand some of the points and share the data I researched in my column (all in my data library, here).

If what JD Vance said about Britain and migration was even halfway true, the post-2000 immigration surge would have sent our crime through the roof. Instead, crime has halved. So let’s look at the Britain that exists, and how it contrasts to the Vance caricature. Each of these charts have links to source data, so anyone can verify and replicate. This is the actual story of our country: it matters.

Henry Nowak’s murder was tragic, harrowing, sickening – but not part of a rising trend. In fact, in this country where immigrants make up one in five of workers, murders are hovering at a 40-year low in absolute terms and a 50-year low when population-adjusted.

Some argue that the decline of murder is a technicality: that medical advances means they don’t die. When I debated Zia Yusuf on Monday, he paraphrased me as saying [16 mins in] “come to London, you’ll be stabbed but thanks to our amazing emergency services you have a better chance of surviving.”

First, here are the figures for London murder: at the lowest in decades. Probably centuries, when you think of what came before.

And to Yusuf’s point – you’re not dying because the NHS is stitching you up? Well, the NHS keeps records of those admitted for knife crime (‘assault by sharp objects’). I updated it to take in the latest. It shows knife casualties at the lowest level since records began 27 years ago. Again, the opposite to the picture that Vance paints:-

It’s not just knife crime. When someone is assaulted and admitted to hospital, the NHS records it. The UK’s NHS model means we have very good data on this: you can mine it from their website. Again, we see hospital admissions for assault hovering at a multi-decade low.

You can click on the above to get ‘injury by bodily force’, by ‘blunt object’ etc: same trend. And let’s remember that one in four NHS staff who serve the country’s sick and injured are immigrants. The period of mass migration has coincided with an unprecedented drop in violent crime. Never have our streets been more racially mixed, it’s true. But seldom have they been safer to walk down. Surveys show women, in particular, say they feel markedly safer walking the streets than they did 30 years ago.

And yes, most crimes are not reported to the police. That’s why the Crime Survey of England & Wales asks 35,000 households to talk about their experience of crime: to give a gold-standard answer. Once again, it makes a mockery of the JD Vance caricature.

Click on the ‘police recorded’ tab and you’ll see a different picture – and here’s the paradox. Better policing means a greater share of crimes are reported. As the situation improves there are more interceptions, people are more confident in reporting crime. If more people were actually being stabbed, assaulted or killed, we’d see it in the hospital or murder figures. These figures show what the crime survey shows: violence roughly halving over the 20 years where the migrant population has doubled.

The switch from immigration to race
Vance is highly intelligent and strategic: unlike Trump he chooses words carefully. Nowak, he said, would still be alive today “if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”

This is not a complaint about today’s immigration. Vickrum Digwa was born here. Vance, like Farage, has switched the criticism to those already here. Both seem to be anticipating how to keep the fight going when migration is under control – as it now is in the UK.

So Vance talks about the threat to the country of migrants’ children. As the father of a migrant’s child, it’s unusual for Vance to take this line: was his Indian wife granted citizenship by nation-hating elites? But set that aside. The narrative switch from immigration to the children of immigrants – portraying them in this case as lethal threats to the white majority – deserves our attention.

This is why we see papers like the Jewish News now defend Muslims: they see where this trend leads, and has always led. First it was the Muslims. Now, the Sikhs. Who do we think might be next? Rupert Lowe, the Reform pace-setter, has already started on Kosher meat. How long until Judaeo is dropped from the demands to protect Europe’s ‘Judaeo-Christian heritage?’.

Even on racial grounds, Vance’s narrative collapses. If you look at the arrest rate by ethnicity – a poor proxy for crime as it doesn’t adjust for social factors – it shows Indians significantly below whites.

What Henry Nowak’s murder reminds us is how far we still have to go. His attacker should never have been allowed to walk around Southampton with a massive knife: the law needs to be clarified so police know to reject false claims of religious exemption. Snatch crime is surging, as is shoplifting: if Vance wanted to talk about rising acquisitive crime he’d have a point. Sexual offences are not experiencing the same trend: there is no surge, but no collapse either.

Vance needs to tell his MAGA base that Britain is a migrant-addled criminal hellhole – and if they’re not careful, America will be too. MAGA politics means selling a worldview, rather than solutions. A dystopia needs victims and villains. This non-stop media circus needs recruits: new people to be angry at. More causes for the currency Vance incites:

Imagine if a UK Prime Minister had issued a statement after George Floyd’s death demanding Americans take to the streets over policing. Or after Rodney King. Or Michael Brown. Or Eric Garner. It would be seen as extraordinary overreach – a foreign leader attempting to promote domestic unrest on a false basis. The Swedes now have a ‘Psychological Defence Unit’ to deal with foreign powers who use fake news to sow internal division: it recognises that these fake, viral claims are assaults on the national fabric. And need to be responded to quickly with the cold, hard truth.

Vance is attacking a Britain that does not exist. Our islands are not seething with racial tension; polls show only one in four buy Farage’s ‘two-tier policing’ line. I suspect his departure this week from anti-migration politics into racial politics will prove a misjudgement. Yes, they won Twitter; by playing the race card they won attention. But I suspect lost most of the country,

Britain is not a place where people who look affrighted or askance at colleagues, neighbours and countrymen who have different faiths or skin colour. My own hunch is that MAGA is obsessed with Britain because we are living rejection of this thesis: a country that has, in Britishness, a unifying theme that people of all faiths, ethnicities and skin colours can unite around. Britain’s story is the opposite of what JD Vance says it is.

I’d like to close with the final paragraph of my Times column:-

Vance has one thing right: there is such a thing as ‘civilisational decline’. A national debate that cannot defend truth when facts are distorted will eventually find itself governed by whichever outrage spreads fastest. “This is not a case about Sikhism,” said Nowak’s family. “This is not a case about racism. This is about murder.” It is hard to imagine a clearer statement of what was lost amid the noise

Ah, interestingly (for anyone still interested!) this is Fraser Nelson’s column in the Times about the Nowak murder. Here, the right-wing journalist in him is more noticeable, but the clarifications of certain of the facts are worthwhile:

Facts are sidelined in dangerous digital courtPrevailing narrative over Henry Nowak’s murder bears little relation to truth but its inflammatory proponents don’t care

Fraser Nelson

There have been too many harrowing videos this week. The sight of a teenage boy being handcuffed even as he was dying; then footage of riots on our streets. Then the young policemen protecting their station as crowds gathered to abuse them. “Have you all been trained to kill white boys?” shouted one. “All trained the same?” Nigel Farage later described it as anger simply spilling over. It struck me as proof of another point: the power of social media to twist narratives to incendiary effect.
That a dying teenager was mistakenly handcuffed by police was appalling enough when the murder of Henry Nowak was first reported. Seeing the video makes the horror visceral. I debated Reform’s Zia Yusuf on Monday and he asked if I thought the video should be released. No, I said; the facts of the case are not contested so video evidence adds nothing but outrage. And there’s a bereaved family to consider. Why expose their son’s dying moments for the benefit of social media? A few hours later it was out, and shared the world over.
Aged 62, Nigel Farage understands the dynamics of the digital world better than his rivals. He understands its power, now that far more people get their news from social media than any newspaper. He understands the opportunities; the old constraints, what establishment types refer to as restraint, no longer apply. He also seems worried about being outbid in this digital-outrage auction by Rupert Lowe’s Restore, which is calling for Vickrum Digwa to hang. The emergence of the video allowed, in effect, a new digital court case, with the police in the dock.
This case has four parts. First, that police rushed to the scene because they thought they were investigating racism, which they prioritise above murder. Next, on arrival they “uncritically” believed the killer’s claim that Nowak had been racist. Thirdly, that Digwa was carrying the 21cm knife thanks to a legal exemption for Sikhs. And finally, the famous “two-tier justice”: a shorter sentence because Sikhs are allowed to carry knives.
But the 999 transcript shows police were called out not to a woolly accusation of racism but an assault, where an injured assailant was being held captive. The cuffing, now seen by the world via the bodycam, was horrific. Digwa’s family, in short, lied. But the judge said Nowak was “handcuffed for about a minute” before the arresting officer tried to save his life. That wasn’t shown in the leaked bodycam footage. In any case the judge said Nowak could not have survived his wounds however quickly he received first aid. The careful erasure of such context allows the story to be transformed into one about anti-white racism.
JD Vance, the US vice-president, now holds up Nowak’s death as an example of the “way a civilisation dies”. His State Department speaks of “two-tiered policing” and the general accusation is that Digwa was legally carrying a knife because he was a Sikh. But in most of the western world, Sikhs are allowed to carry a “kirpan” knife, often small, as part of their faith. The killer had one around his neck. But, as the Sikh Federation has pointed out, he was in the habit of walking around with a second knife, a 21cm dagger. Even if it was religious, said the judge, it would make no difference to the verdict. That’s what he was convicted of: possession of a bladed weapon as well as murder.
And the length of the sentence? In his letter to the attorney-general, Farage protests that “murderers are punished more leniently if they use religious weapons as instruments of murder”. No such discount exists. Murder sentences carry a starting point of 25 years if a weapon is taken to the scene in order to kill; 15 years if not, as here. For Digwa, the judge added eight years for ten aggravating factors, among them that he had “abused the privilege extended to Sikhs” and “dishonoured” his religion: with mitigation, that became a 21-year minimum. Religion made his sentence longer, not shorter.
The facts are there. But who would point them out in so febrile a mood? Even the home secretary didn’t: an inquiry is under way, she said. Sensible. Dangerously so. In the current era, ambiguity is exploited to create incendiary accusations. “The message from the establishment is clear: white lives don’t matter,” says Farage. “White suffering doesn’t count.” So we can see racial politics becoming a core part of Reform’s message. A big step — and one Farage may come to regret.
Politicians have always picked facts to suit. It’s 60 years since Hannah Arendt’s Truth and Politics, arguing that modern media has made facts surprisingly fragile, easily erased. Even bullied out of the debate. “Factual truth that opposes a certain group’s agenda,” she wrote, “is greeted today with greater hostility than ever before.” Facts about progress have, oddly, become unsayable. Which minister, for example, would dare mention that hospital A&E records suggest stabbing and assault incidents have halved over just 20 years?
A senior police chief recently told me they have all but given up trying to correct the record on social media. A dangerous decision. Rightly or wrongly, this is the public square. If the terrain is left to those selling narratives of racial or religious conflict, our debate will be shaped accordingly. Standing up for the small points may be hard; politically costly. Especially when the mood is febrile. But if lies are let slip then bigger lies are built on top of them. We end up with an inverted pyramid of deceit, usually pointed at a minority.
There are many serious points here. Positive discrimination has undoubtedly eroded the sense of people being treated equally before public institutions. Too often accusations of racism, no matter how spurious, can stifle debate. The police investigation needs to be unsparing in how far Digwa’s claim of racism was believed, and why Nowak was breezily dismissed when he said he’d been stabbed. The kirpan law needs clarifying. Sikhs themselves have raised concerns that young men are exploiting confusion by carrying knives for no religious reason, as Digwa seems to have been doing.
Robust action is needed. But a paralysed government risks letting problems and ambiguity linger, while false narratives grow. When the facts and the appalling mistakes of this case are properly considered, they show a mixed picture. Which of us really believes that, if we called 999 and said we were restraining an assailant, officers would not come quickly? Or that initially, for the first minute or two, they would not believe the account of those who made the call?
The US State Department had one thing right: there is such a thing as civilisational decline. A national debate that cannot defend truth when facts are distorted will eventually find itself governed by whichever outrage spreads fastest. “This is not a case about Sikhism,” said Nowak’s family. “This is not a case about racism. This is about murder.” It is hard to imagine a clearer statement of what was lost amid the noise.

Thanks for link, Charles, but not for the Grok element. I wonder if you know that two police officers have had to go into hiding after Grok wrongly identified them as part of team that handcuffed Henry Nowak?

I wonder if you know that two police officers have had to go into hiding after Grok wrongly identified them as part of team that handcuffed Henry Nowak?

“Former Hampshire police constable Christi Hill (who left the force in April 2024, well before the December 2025 incident) and another officer, Tristan Parsons (who was abroad at the time), were wrongly identified by users on X and by the Grok AI chatbot as being among the officers visible in bodycam footage. That footage showed police handcuffing Henry Nowak (an 18-year-old who had been stabbed and was dying) while he repeatedly said he had been stabbed and could not breathe”

Validity of Grok Claim

For once I read the grok piece, which accuses the piece of “strong anti-X, pro-Y, pro-Z bias”, where I have omitted X, Y, and Z, because they don’t matter.

If we rely on AI to tell us what is biased, we are lost. All it can do is assess how some analysis compares with the rubbish it finds on the internet.

The piece exhibits a strong pro-fact bias. That’s all. When reality is biased, let’s go with it anyway.