To celebrate this week’s 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, the European Movement has launched a ‘powerful intergenerational film’ which, it says, ‘exposes Brexit as the biggest threat to peace since the 1994 ceasefire’. The film contains ‘true stories of how… Europe’s mission, commitment and hope for a peaceful future transformed Northern Ireland, changed the course of history and inspired the world’. Not a lot of people know that. Even fewer know that ‘the only organisation with the courage and commitment to… win the Battle for the Soul of our Country – is the European Movement.’ Mere raving? Such thoughts are not a million miles from EU/US orthodoxy. In January, Sir Keir Starmer said, at Queen’s University, Belfast, that: ‘The Good Friday Agreement is the greatest achievement of the Labour party in my lifetime, without question.’ The essential Starmer vision is of a world in which human rights, invigilated by wise people with good legal training (such as one Keir Starmer, former human rights adviser to the Northern Ireland Policing Board), transcend national barriers and unseemly national parliaments. Instead, regional bodies, plus Scotland and Wales, benignly overseen by something like a European Union, run all places in a Good Friday Agreement sort of way. I suspect his soon-to-be chief of staff Sue Gray, who tried and failed to become permanent secretary in the Northern Ireland Office and has a long personal interest in the subject, feels likewise. The apotheosis of Starmerism would be a reverse takeover of the United Kingdom by a GFA-governed Northern Ireland which was, to all intents and purposes, in the EU.

Few institutions have been less creative in our public life than the Confederation of British Industry. Whenever the need for change has become desperate, the CBI has faced backwards. In the 1970s, it stood for prices and incomes policy and ‘sitting round the table’ with union leaders when what was needed – and what happened under Mrs Thatcher, Nigel Lawson and Norman Tebbit – was a complete overhaul of labour law, privatisation and the end of corporatism. In the Brexit struggle, CBI leaders like Sir Mike Rake and Dame Carolyn Fairbairn were the unmediated voice of Brussels. They were also enthusiasts for greater engagement with China (Sir Mike joining the board of Huawei UK). More recently, the CBI has been puffing and panting in the global ‘race for net zero’, instead of interrogating its impossibilities. Now Tony Danker, the CBI director-general who has just been sacked for ‘workplace misconduct’, is understandably upset. He had been promised that he could make his case to the board. This story’s trajectory is typical of modern Britain: top officers can lead their organisation complacently in the wrong direction for decades without any career blip but can be destroyed almost overnight by allegations of sexual misconduct before anything is proved.

When Rina and Maia Dee, Jewish girls, British citizens, were shot in the West Bank last Friday, the Foreign Office said it was ‘saddened to hear about the deaths of British-Israeli citizens and the serious injuries sustained by a third individual’. It urged ‘all parties’ to ‘de-escalate the situation’. Those words were coldly chosen. Yes, they were indeed ‘deaths’, but it would have been better said they were terrorist murders. Yes, there was a ‘third individual’ involved, but why not say she was the girls’ mother, Lucy (who subsequently died)? Yes, all parties should de-escalate everything, but it was not ‘all parties’ that killed the Dees. The British words contrast strikingly with those of the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, about a separate murder in Tel Aviv the same day: ‘I express deep sorrow… for the death of one of our nationals, Alessandro Parini, in the terrorist attack… Condolences to the victim’s family, to the wounded, and solidarity with the state of Israel for the cowardly attack that hit him.’ That’s better, much better. Later, the Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, condemned the Lee family killings, using the word ‘murder’, but his department’s instinctive, immediate reaction was telling.

When I work on what the National Trust, museums and heritage bodies are up to about net zero, slavery, ‘colonialism’, ‘purposeful participation’ etc, I study their tweets, videos and reports of their conferences. When thus gathered, they never talk interestedly about a particular building, artwork or garden. All their talk is instrumental – what should be done with these things, rather than thinking about them in their own right. What obsesses the participants is what they call ‘the sector’. ‘The sector’ has an ‘inclusion policy’. ‘The sector’ needs to organise to lobby government (for more ‘resources’, of course). ‘The sector’ makes sure its members give one another jobs and ‘share best practice’. It’s grim.

Into my inbox comes a message from Sinovac. It is launching a new green, sustainable vaccine production facility near Beijing, ‘leveraging digital and intelligent technologies’ to ‘optimise’ the process. One technology is the ‘management execution system’ (MES). It is not news, surely, that the offshoots of the Chinese Communist party have efficient execution systems. It has used them on millions since 1949.

No Wiltshire police officer, it has recently been announced, may join the force’s rural crime team if he/she has any link with hunting, even a pre-ban one or one with legal trail-hunting. This provision misunderstands country life. In areas like Wiltshire, many who have never hunted, e.g. a farmer who lets hunts cross his land, will have some link with hunting. Might not some knowledge of the subject and the communities involved accord with Peel’s famous doctrine of ‘policing by consent’? Wiltshire police say they are also barring anyone linked with anti-hunt protests. But there is no symmetry here. Hunting is part of a rural way of life. Anti-hunt protests are political/ideological.