On Saturday night a 21-year-old named Abdul Ballout drove a rented van into the crowds at Berlin Pride, then got out and went to work with a machete. One woman is dead. Twenty-nine people are injured, several critically. Ballout had already been convicted, last year, of trying to join Islamic State. A German court gave him a suspended sentence and released him into the population he then mowed down. On Sunday, having charged police officers with a blade, he was shot dead in a Spandau allotment. The German Interior Minister called it what it was, an Islamist terror attack on a celebration of gay life.
You might think that would be a difficult event to misread. You would be underestimating the modern Labour Party.
Kate Osborne MP, within hours, took to Facebook to explain what Berlin really meant. Not a word about Islamism. Not a syllable about the ideology that hangs homosexuals from cranes wherever it holds power. Instead she drew a line from a banned Pride march in Romania, through Reform UK, through GB News, to the corpse in the Tiergarten. Reform and GB News, she informed her readers, form part of the “patterns emerging across Europe” of which a dead woman in Berlin is the terminus. When this was pointed out to her, she doubled down at length, insisting she had blamed nobody while re-listing all the people she blamed, and complaining that the “abusive messages” she received were “mostly from Reform bots.”
Reform bots. A Lebanese-German jihadist, convicted of IS offences, butchers people at Pride, and a Labour MP’s mind flies unbidden to a television channel in Paddington and a political party polling first in Britain. This is not analysis. It is a reflex, a twitch of the ideological knee, and it tells you everything about the state of the British left in the summer of 2026.
Consider the moment she chose. Ann Widdecombe is three weeks dead. A 78-year-old woman, found in her home on the edge of Dartmoor with what police would only describe as serious injuries – 21 hammer blows serious. The man arrested on suspicion of killing her has since been rearrested under terrorism powers, the investigation now led by Counter Terrorism Policing. He is a 28-year-old white British national. Whatever emerges at trial, and I will not prejudge it, the mere fact that anti-terror detectives are pursuing “the motivation for this attack” against a socially conservative Brexiteer ought to have sobered every politician in the country. It ought, at minimum, to have made a Labour MP pause before typing the words “Reform” and “catalyst for real-world physical violence” in the same post.
It did not. Because the traffic, in their minds, runs only one way. Words from the right are violence. Violence against the right is dawn mist.
And so to Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, who this week posted and then deleted a photograph of a man in a t-shirt reading “We’re only making plans for Nigel” above an image of a guillotine.
A guillotine.
The instrument that separates a head from a neck, worn as a gag about a named, living British politician, one who has already survived an assassination plot, whose would-be killer was convicted in open court, and whose colleague and friend lies unburied while detectives work the terror angle.
Farage has called for Polanski’s arrest for incitement. He will wait a long time. Polanski deleted the post, which in the modern grammar of politics counts as contrition, and the Lobby moved on with the alacrity of men who have seen nothing.
Run the counterfactual, because the Lobby never will. Imagine Nigel Farage posting a photograph of a noose captioned with Zack Polanski’s name. Imagine it staying up for an hour.
There would be emergency editions of Newsnight. There would be a recalled Commons, a tearful urgent question, think-pieces on the fascist imagination stretching to the horizon like standing corn.
The Metropolitan Police, who can find five officers to arrest a comedy writer for a tweet, would discover in themselves an unsuspected zeal. Farage would be charged by teatime and convicted by Christmas. But a guillotine for Nigel is satire, apparently. It is punching up. The blade is only a metaphor until the day it isn’t, and we are just about to bury the day it isn’t.
Meanwhile the week’s actual violence proceeded on its usual lines. In Paris, three women, one of them pregnant, were attacked by a man with knives who reportedly announced that Allah had commanded it, while police declared themselves engaged in the delicate forensic work of establishing a motive.
One pictures the incident room, the whiteboard, the baffled detectives. Gambling debts, perhaps. A dispute over a parking space. Across the Channel came a boat carrying 165 people, among them, it is reported, men suspected of murdering another migrant on a French beach before embarkation, welcomed into Britain by a state that cannot tell us who they are. And we learn, not for the first time, that Iranian intelligence personnel have been using the small boats as a service entrance into the United Kingdom. Any one of these stories would once have convulsed a government. Now they arrive like tide tables.
Here I must declare my interests, since Ms Osborne has declared them for me. I am a GB News contributor. I am an elected board member of Reform UK. I am, in the Osborne cosmology, part of the pattern, a tributary of the great river of hate that ends in a Berlin park. I have been in and around this movement for a quarter of a century and I have received hundreds of threats in that time.
I never took them seriously. I always assumed, mostly correctly, that they issued from sad sacks in cellars, men whose menace expired at the point of having to put on shoes or probably pink and green crocs. But something has changed since Ann died. For the first time in my life, friends, serious and unexcitable people, have taken me aside and told me to look to my security. To vary my routines. To take care.
I won’t, but I thank them for their concern. I decline to live crouched. But note what it means that they felt they had to say it. The temperature has been raised deliberately, by degrees, by people who know exactly what they are doing. When you spend years telling your followers that your opponents are not wrong but evil, not mistaken but Nazis, that their television channel kills and their party maims, you should not be astonished when some damaged soul takes you at your word.
That was, we were endlessly told, the lesson of Jo Cox, and it was a true lesson. It has simply been repealed for one side of politics.
Let me say the unsayable thing plainly. It is not Reform UK that drove a van into Berlin Pride. It is not GB News that ran at those women in Paris. Across Europe, the people actually killing homosexuals, actually knifing women, are Islamists, and the people cheering the intimidation of the right, excusing it, giggling at guillotine t-shirts, are on the left. And if the arrest of Ann Widdecombe’s alleged killer under anti-terrorism laws is anything to go by, the two currents of menace in this country do not flow from Paddington.
Mr Polanski might reflect, in a quiet moment, on his own position. He is a gay Jewish man. How does he imagine he would fare in any country governed by the ideology that emptied that van into the Tiergarten? In Tehran, in Raqqa, in Kabul, his sexuality is a death sentence and his ancestry a second one. The movement he flirts with at every march would not thank him for his solidarity. It would hang him twice. Yet his guillotine is reserved for Nigel Farage, who has spent his career defending the free society in which Zack Polanski can be all that he is, loudly, safely, and at public expense.
The British left is emboldened, and there is something worse than anger in it now. There is relish. One senses, and I choose the word with care, that some of them are not entirely sorry when people die, if the deaths can be conscripted into the cause, if a body in Berlin can be laid at the door of a broadcaster, if the intimidation of their opponents can be laundered as accountability. They believe the fear is working. They believe we will trim, soften, fall silent, that the threats and the t-shirts and the sneering communiqués will do what argument could not.
They have misread us as badly as Osborne misread Berlin. Ann is dead and we are still here. The threats arrive and the polls will rise. Every guillotine meme recruits another family in another town that has had enough of being despised. We will neither be intimidated nor silenced.
We grow.
(UKR)