“There are a lot of people that are afraid, that are afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of how it feels to be Muslim in this country.”
Oscar-winning Susan Sarandon’s comments at a pro-Palestine rally in New York saw her dropped by her representatives, United Talent Agency. Sarandon is far from new to activism and politics, having spent her many decades in the spotlight discussing various issues. It seems that this time she may have gone too far, judging by the reaction of UTA.
The newest development in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine/Hamas has captivated the world, from the United Nations to local councils. Governments at all levels across every country have voted on ceasefires, because county councils apparently have a lot of say in geopolitics.
What is arguably even more prominent is the input of our entertainers. One can easily browse X or Instagram for a few moments and find a litany of celebrities who have given their views on the conflict. As a general rule, said celebrities have called for a ceasefire. In response to conflict, calling for a ceasefire is treated as the obvious response- it’s easy to say, you don’t sound too partisan and it’s essentially saying you just don’t like war. Any more nuance than that isn’t really expected of anyone.
At the end of one such open letter, those who signed it stated that “the United States can play a viral diplomatic role in ending the suffering.”
The United States probably can, yes. Celebrities? Not so much.
Celebrities like to use their voices to amplify issues, from war and presidential endorsements to abortion and LGBT rights. One only has to look at the star-studded events held by Hillary Clinton in 2016 to see how celebrities gravitate towards politics. Considering Clinton boasted guests like Katy Perry and Beyoncé, it’s plain to see that it’s a voice politicians accept. You’ll find celebrities using social media, posting blacked out squares on Instagram in an apparent promotion of Black Lives Matter. Perhaps they’ll wear a pink hat to protest anti-abortion legislation.
They are well within their right to do this, as we all should be. They also generally reside in the country in which they protest. The issue, however, comes when celebrities meddle in geopolitics.
The conflict in the Middle East is not an easy one, despite claims to the contrary. It involves years of religious and ethnic fighting, controversial borders, terror, violence, and bloodshed. The sides cannot, and often will not, agree to terms. So precious is Jerusalem to religious groups that conflict in its holy sites is far from rare. Saying ‘oh let’s have a ceasefire’ may stop a few problems in the short term, but it’s not a permanent stop to generations of problems.
Most notably, celebrities may have a say in their collective fan communities, but they do not have any influence on geopolitics. Even Joe Biden, who the aforementioned open letter was directed at, did not listen. Meanwhile, both Palestine and Israel are doing what they believe they need to do to survive. Hamas is doing what they believe they need to do to eradicate Israel. They are not going to listen to someone with an Oscar nomination or a Top Ten song.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t speak out about issues because we feel it won’t influence things. Celebrities have the right to talk about the conflict, but let’s not pretend that we should care what they think or that it has any influence on anything. Most of us- celebrities and normal people- do not have the expertise to properly understand the situation. We can take a moral stance, but let’s not pretend that celebrities are necessarily informed.
The action, however well intentioned, is almost always performative. Celebrities allow themselves to be almost bullied into saying something, anything, by fans so that they’re not cancelled. Look at Taylor Swift. Her platform and wealth are equally large, so much so that her general lack of political inclinations is met with side-eye at best, and boycotts at worst. We expect celebrities to act as moral leaders and arbiters, to the detriment of real discussion.
Perhaps one day we won’t expect celebrities to be geopolitical experts. Perhaps one day celebrities won’t feel the need to ensure that their views aren’t the most important in the room. Much as COVID and January 6 turned people into armchair experts in virology and treason laws, the conflict in the Middle East has made us all experts in international relations.
Celebrities, continue calling for ceasefires if you wish, but don’t expect Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas to take you up on your advice.
-
The Campaign for Scottish Independence is back to Square One
‘Within the next five years, in one form or another, break-up is likely to come about’. These are not the reflections of an unhappily married man, but a pronouncement on the fate of Great Britain, as prophesied by none other than Tom Nairn, widely considered the intellectual flagbearer for Scottish nationalism up until his death last year. Most notable for his book The Break-up of Britain, which foretells the dissolution of the United Kingdom as a consequence of imperial decline, Nairn, delivering one of his final interviews, felt confident enough to declare that the hour was finally at hand, despite being ‘usually cautious about predicting timelines’.
Nairn wasn’t alone in his prediction. According to a Survation poll, when asked ‘How likely or unlikely do you think it is that there will be another referendum on Scottish independence in the next five years?’, 65% of Scots were of the opinion that it was either ‘Very likely’ ‘or ‘Quite likely’. Only 25% answered ‘Quite unlikely’ or ‘Very unlikely’. The 65% may indeed be correct; but if any such referendum is to take place within the given timeframe, Scottish nationalists will have to pray for a miracle to happen within the next week or so, seeing as the survey in question was conducted all the way back in October 2019. Nairn’s five-year prediction was made in 2020, which affords it slightly more leeway. Yet the odds that the Scottish National Party, which only months ago suffered a crushing defeat at the ballot box, is able to persuade the British government to grant them a second vote by next year are slim to none. The truth is that the nationalist cause hasn’t looked more hopeless since the result of the original Scottish Independence referendum in 2014.
Even that episode, in which the UK faced its first truly existential threat since England and Scotland were united in 1707, ended on a modestly optimistic note for separatists. While the result of the vote was 55-45 in favour of Scotland remaining in the UK, the fact that Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish National Party, had been able to secure a referendum from the British government in the first place – and that the ‘Yes’ side, as the pro-Independence side became known, had come so close to winning – was taken by many as a sure sign that the Union was on its last legs. Worse still for the ‘No’ side, the fact that Independence was more popular among younger voters seemed to suggest that the end of the UK was not only inevitable but imminent. Led by liberal activists whose passionate appeals invoked the rhetoric of earlier Independence movements in former British colonies, the nationalists’ quest for freedom from the English yoke became an end goal for progressives; it was merely a matter of time before the pendulum swung left, thereby slicing in half the nation-state that birthed the modern world.
Any doubts anyone may have harboured about the impending demise of the UK were surely dispelled by the political turbulence that followed the referendum – the general election a year later, the other referendum the year after that, if not the snap election that took place the year after that – which to onlookers home and abroad resembled the death throes of a spent entity. In particular, amidst the chaos that occurred in the wake of the UK’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016, the only thing anyone seemed to be able to predict with any certainty was that Scotland – which had voted 62-38 to remain in the EU – would jump ship at the soonest opportunity. (Around a third of Scottish voters even believed that there would be another referendum before the UK completed the Brexit proceedings.)
Indeed, for many unionists, the ostensible advantages of remaining within the European Union proved a deciding factor in their ‘No’ vote: a stronger economy, representation at the European Parliament, and facilitated travel to the continent. As part of the UK, Scotland was by extension part of the EU, and a newly independent Scotland would surely struggle to gain re-entry to a bloc which mandates a 3% deficit ratio for all member states, given that the nation’s deficit hovered around 10%. But the UK’s vote to leave the EU put a knot in that theoretical chain of consequences. Remaining in the UK became a guarantee that Scotland would be cut off from the EU, while Independence under the stewardship of the passionately pro-Europe Scottish National Party at least allowed for the possibility, however scant, of being ‘welcomed back into the EU with open arms as an independent country’, in the words of one MP.
Against this backdrop, even the most optimistic unionist would not have expected the status quo to hold. And yet, 10 years on from the 2014 referendum, Independence polls produce, on average, the same 55-45 split. So what happened?
As it turned out, while Britain’s decision to leave the EU predictably shored up support for the SNP, it also complicated the logistics of Independence. The smallest matryoshka in the set, Scotland would find itself not only isolated but vulnerable, separated by a hard border with its only contiguous neighbour. The country would have to decide between a customs union with England, Wales and Northern Ireland (which collectively constitute the greater part of Scotland’s trade) or with the much larger, but more distant, EU.
And while a number of sometime unionists found themselves suddenly on the ‘Yes’ side of the debate – including a contingent of high-profile figures, from the actors Ewan McGregor and John Hannah to the writers Andrew O’Hagan and John Burnside – a number of those who had voted ‘No’ in 2014 suddenly found themselves siding with the so-called ‘Little Englander’s. These Eurosceptic defectors were broadly comprised of what the commentator David Goodhart would go on to classify as ‘somewheres’: patriotic Scots, typically older and poorer, and defined by a profound attachment to the place they call home, as opposed to the cosmopolitan aloofness of ‘anywheres’. An understudied but significant section of society, Scottish ‘somewheres’ have been instrumental in preventing separatism gaining a majority in the almost weekly polls, considering how many elderly, unionist voters have passed away in the last ten years, and how many Gen-Z, overwhelmingly pro-Indpendence voters have aged into the electorate.
Then there was COVID. As with every other political matter, the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in 2019 dramatically changed the nature of the Independence debate. Since pandemic response was a devolved matter, the four home nations took a competitive approach to dealing with the virus. While Prime Minister Boris Johnson was initially reluctant to impose lockdowns, Sturgeon lost no time in employing comparatively draconian measures, such as mask mandates and severe quarantine regulations. As a result, Scotland was able to boast a considerably lower death rate than England. Between January 2020 and June 2021, excess deaths in Scotland were only around 3% higher than average, compared with England, where they were 6 % higher. This measurable discrepancy had the effect of suggesting to many minds that not only was Scotland capable of handling its own affairs, but that government under the SNP was safer and more effective than direct rule from Westminster. For the first time, Independence polls consistently suggested that the ‘Yes’ side would win a hypothetical referendum..
But the momentum didn’t last. As the months passed, and particularly as Johnson was coerced into a stricter COVID policy, adopting many of the SNP’s own strategies, the gap in hospitalisation and death rates between each of the home nations narrowed to a pinpoint. Moreover, the UK had developed its own vaccine, and thanks to opting out of the EU’s vaccine rollout was able to conduct its vaccination campaign far more rapidly than any other European country.
From there it was all downhill for the SNP. In the summer of 2021, it transpired that the party had been misallocating donations and routinely lying about membership figures. Nicola Sturgeon, who had replaced Salmond as First Minister after the 2014 referendum, resigned in February 2023, citing gridlock around the Independence question. A month later Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband and chief executive of the SNP, was arrested as part of a police investigation into the party’s finances, prompting the SNP’s auditors to resign as well.
Sturgeon was replaced as party leader by Humza Yousaf. But while the former First Minister had been able to command respect even from her adversaries, Yousaf, who lacked Sturgeon’s charisma and the prestige that comes with an established reputation, proved a far more divisive leader at a time when the party was crying out for unity. The fact that Yousaf only narrowly won the leadership contest, after his openly Presbyterian opponent had been slandered by members of her own coalition for espousing ‘extreme religious views’, did little to endear him to the Christian wing of his party. Perhaps most controversially, his decision to carry forward the Gender Reform Bill – which made it possible to change one’s legal gender on a whim by removing the requirement of a medical diagnosis – provoked derision from a public which still falls, for the most part, on the socially conservative side of the fence. Nor were progressives much impressed by his decision to end the SNP’s power-sharing agreement with the Scottish Greens.
Yousaf resigned after thirteen months in office and was replaced by John Swinney, one of the more moderate senior members of the party, but the damage to the SNP’s credibility had already been done. With less than two months to go until the UK-wide general election, Swinney had his work cut out for him when it came to convincing Scots to continue to put their trust in the scandal-ridden SNP. Independence polling returned to pre-COVID levels. However, for nationalists, such polls were less germane to the pursuit of a second referendum than the election polls, given that keeping a pro-Independence party at the helm in Holyrood was a necessary prerequisite to secession. As long as the SNP commanded a majority of seats, there was a democratic case to be made for holding another referendum. This had been Sturgeon’s argument during the 2021 Scottish parliament election campaign, which was, in her eyes, a ‘de facto referendum’. If the SNP were to end up with a majority of seats, she claimed, the party would have the permission of the Scottish people to begin Independence proceedings. (As it happened, they went on to win sixty-four seats – one short of a majority.)
The SNP had fewer seats in the House of Commons, but the nature of Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system meant they still enjoyed considerable overrepresentation. Still, if possessing forty-eight seats at parliament was not enough to secure a referendum from the British government, then plummeting to a meagre nine seats in the 2024 general election killed the prospect stone dead. As the Labour party made sweeping gains in Scotland and the UK more widely, the SNP suffered the worst defeat in its 90-year history. In a speech following the election, a dour-faced Swinney acknowledged the need ‘to accept that we failed to convince people of the urgency of independence in this election campaign.’ The party ‘need[ed] to be healed and it need[ed] to heal its relationship with the people of Scotland’.
It is difficult to take note of something that isn’t there, which is perhaps why, as Ian MacWhirter noted in a piece for Unherd, ‘It doesn’t seem to have fully dawned on the UK political establishment that the break-up of Britain, which seemed a real possibility only a few years ago, has evaporated’. The topic of Independence now rarely features in the news, and some of the biggest names associated with Scottish nationalism – not only Nairn and Burnside, but also Alasdair Gray, Sean Connery and Winifred Ewing – have passed away in the decade since the referendum. Meanwhile, younger Scots are turning away from nationalism in general, an unforeseen phenomenon which MacWhirter puts down to the fallout from Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, a sequence of geopolitical shocks that has many Scots wondering whether the campaign to sacrifice the nation’s economy and security on the altar of identity might well be recklessly indulgent. ‘The Union is probably safer now than at any time since the Jacobites waved their claymores 300 years ago.’
If the SNP hope to bring the dream of Independence back to life, it will not be enough to rely on generational shift and the goodwill of the British government. An uphill struggle awaits the Independence movement. It will entail extensive repairs to the party’s image, providing clarity on issues such as currency, retention of the monarchy and the route to EU membership, and – perhaps hardest of all – presenting a clear case as to why Scotland would be better off as an independent nation. Until then, the Union looks set to enjoy a new lease of life.
-
Britain’s Fifth Column
A fifth column is “a group within a country at war who are sympathetic to or working for its enemies.”
We have a problem that is acknowledged but gets little to no serious attention in the official political or media spheres; the growing Islamic base that has been imported into this country. Given the above definition, it might seem absurd to imply that these people are a fifth column, seeing as we don’t appear to be directly at war, but we are. I would not call this a cold war as there are many thousands of victims of its adherents living among us in Britain currently. To do so would be to diminish their experience, something our traitorous state has done more than enough of.
Islam is its own self-contained religion and civilisational structure. By allowing this population to grow, we are fostering an ideology that will only seek to grow and supplant our society because that is what their god demands. Islam has been allowed to run parallel to our society by our cowardly state permitting Sharia courts, turning a blind eye to polygamous marriages, and generally leaving these guests to their own devices as they overtake British cities. While deplorable and deeply distressing, this has so far been contained, not so much any more. The Islamic community is breaking out, it’s establishing a significant voting bloc and this heralds a dark omen for things to come. In a great twist of irony, it seems Labour will be the first to fall foul of this new political development.
Contrary to their minority position, the Islamic community in Britain has a relatively tight grasp on small businesses in corner shops, barbers, hot food takeaways, off-licences, and petrol stations. They’ve also got an increasingly large share in drug dealing, likely facilitated by these interconnect, all hours, businesses, where cash is king and electronic fraud is missed. HMRC doesn’t have the resources to deal with such matters effectively, often fearing accusations of bigotry and being threatened with violence whenever they try to conduct their investigations. This is where Mohammed Hijab’s (a real name I’m told) bizarre TV comments about blasphemy against Islam not being tolerated by “Muslim gangsters” likely come from. We’ve seen this before, from the murder of Kris Donald to the grooming gangs. The community sheltering the vile perpetrators, in my mind, damns them. The religious extremists and the cultural criminals go hand in hand.
The more odious elements of Islam in Britain claim they have conquered Britain – that is, being imported by our traitorous elite and living off welfare. Make no mistake, this is not Mohammed taking Mecca from the pagans, these people are arrogant welfare queens that the state protects and cajoles at every opportunity. Where is this arrogance coming from? Is it their status beyond criticism? The enshrining of Islamophobia as an ultimate crime against “Modern British Values” is certainly a problem. We have Muslim MPs almost brought to tears in Parliament for mean words while White children up and down the country are groomed and raped by adherents of their ideology and culture, fanatic or otherwise; crocodile tears from a vile community that not-so-secretly laughs about the modern woes of the native British.
Muslim gaslighting doesn’t end in Parliament. Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed put out a bizarre video a few years ago in which National Front types went door to door ethnically cleansing Muslims from England. I thought this to be a particularly bizarre thing to do when you consider the terrorism rate, per capita, of the Islamic vs British community. To me this was a tell in his thinking, it acknowledges that fundamentally they are at war with us. Riz also starred in the film Four Lions, which follows a hapless Jihadi’s attempt to carry out a terror attack in the UK. The film, while amusing, does paint these men (other than the grossly unsympathetic White convert) as sympathetic in their idiocy, with Ahmed’s character leading his less bright friends astray. Outside the context of the film, I find this portrayal to be unrealistic. The average second-gen or third-gen Muslim youth sincerely hates Britain, its history, and its people. They’ll prioritise and take the side of foreign conflicts over any domestic issue concerning the British nation. The most they’ll interact with British culture is through the superficiality of sport.
Moreover, there is a bizarre Africanisation of British Muslim culture, Ali G was a send-up of this, but Cohen seemed to back away from this obvious interpretation for whatever reason. Drug culture, speaking in a pseudo-Jamaican patois (to steal from Starkey) mixed with Muslim conventions, producing a particularly unpleasant and idiotic-sounding dialect. A glorification of crime, violence, and importantly terrorism pervades this culture. We’ve seen this play out across the pro-Palestine demonstrations happening over recent months. To quickly touch on drug culture, cannabis is a major drug among this group. People like Peter Hitchens get the relationship twisted. They assume that cannabis is the cause of terror, not that these people engage in drug culture because they are themselves a criminal and subversive element in society. Do drugs exacerbate their hatred? I wouldn’t doubt it, but the hatred is before the imbibing of wicked poisons.
This is all an incredibly dangerous mix that the state and security services seem to barely be able to keep a lid on. Despite their protestations that right-wing terrorism is the biggest threat, this is clearly nonsense. Islamic terror threats outstrip right-wing ones by miles, even with the vast population difference. This can also be seen in the police’s reluctance to police the entrenched Muslim community. What are they so afraid of? My guess is terroristic violence. To cow in the face of such a threat is basically to guarantee you will hand the country to Islamists.
What is to be done about this? Ideas have been floated about banning certain aspects of the religion to encourage them to self-deport but again, this relies on enforcement by the state which it is both unwilling and incapable of doing. I would propose a ban on the production, import, and sale of ritualistically slaughtered meat as that would be the easiest to enforce without confrontation. Businesses would be shuttered, products would be impounded at customs, and we would stand firmly on the side of animal rights. It’s reprehensible to me that Britain should take a step backward in this regard to placate alien desert religions. Naturally, this ban would affect the Jewish community, but that’s a sacrifice we will need to make for the future of Britain. The Jewish community is particularly robust and progressive when it comes to issues of wrestling with God, and I’m sure they’d find a way around our new law.
Less practical solutions have been offered; recently I’ve seen people saying that public prayer should be banned in response to mass Islamic worship in London. This is a nonsense approach that would only affect our beleaguered Christian community and would likely not be enforced fairly. Some have suggested banning cousin marriages. Whilst well-intentioned, the main thrust of my objection to such a policy is that we haven’t had to ban it for it to no longer be practised in this country (outside the Muslim community and presumable other outliers). Simply put, we’d be creating a nationwide law for an imported subset of the population. It’s not the thin end of the wedge of tyranny, but it does point to the ridiculous codification of a multiracial society.
Groups are so vastly different in outlook and disposition that you need to make the detrimental illegal for it to appear to function. Perhaps we should take it as a sign that people who willingly marry their cousins and as such have the largest disabled community in Britain shouldn’t be living among us. Britain does not exist to serve as a eugenic uplift scheme for foreign people who cleave to a religion that orders them to supplant us. On an entirely different and less targeted front, the deportation of economic net negatives would substantially reduce the Islamic population of Britain, but the problem of Islam would remain, albeit at perpetual minority levels.
Approaching last Christmas, we saw the usual warning of terror attacks rolled out for many festive markets and events that are happening across the country. If you attend any of these markets, you will likely notice the ethnic make-up of the security and the broken English with which they communicate. It’s not lost on me that many of these men are of African, non-Muslim, extraction however many are of Muslim origin and I find it entirely insane that threats from Islamic terrorism would be policed by fresh off-the-boat Muslims. We have a growing force of non-white imported security, increasingly used by businesses because they are cheap and a state which seeks to enforce anti-white laws, which is worrying. Their conduct is poor, and their obvious biases and unfamiliarity with Britain can’t be ignored.
In a recent clip, a piano player is aggressively harassed by foreign security. Is the proliferation of such people across the UK security sector related to the housing of fighting aged illegals now being overseen by two of the biggest private security companies Serco and G4S? It’s certainly a question worth asking. It is not without reason that it could be expected for such people to end up in the official police forces of Britain eventually. Standards in policing have been dropping for decades, if things are not reversed, I imagine we will start seeing these people transition into the force within the decade.
To me, this is all part of the plan, the expansion of the police state. Contrary to Telegraph hacks, the police state is already here. This great panopticon of Modern Britain, with its pervasive speech laws coupled with the new ‘diverse’ religiosity, forms a tyranny of leftists and racial mafias over the native population. As with everything in Modern Britain, the “elite” have made a vast miscalculation. Creating such a system will be subverted and controlled by the most vocal, violent, and united community. Without a doubt, that community is the Islamic one. While they are still a minority, they will increasingly wield disproportionate, anti-democratic, power over us all. It’s a horrific reverse colonialism where we, the native British, have been entangled in a web of increasingly complex and restrictive laws that all but guarantee our disempowerment. The Tories are utter traitors and completely politically spent for not seeing this and not doing anything about it for their fourteen years in power. Hopefully, they’ll be destroyed at the next election and a new, vigorous, and unapologetically nationalist force can rise to lift us out of this predicament decades of political incompetence and deliberate malice have brought us to.
I do not believe Islam will take over Britain is guaranteed, I do not believe that things are too far gone. Britain is broken and while Islam is germinating in this environment it’s entirely imported. For the most part, the White British converts we see are the most broken of outsiders, with fringe academics constituting a bizarre exception. Most people in Britain look at the Islamic community with rightful derision. They may not express it openly but in their hearts, they see it as a thuggish religion of petty criminals and child rapists. This is the version of Islam that the immigrants have brought to our shores, the blame is squarely on themselves and they alone shame their Ummah. Indeed, Arab Muslims in states like the UAE or Saudi often wonder why we have let such people settle in our lands, a favour they do not permit to their “brothers and sisters.”
In order to prevent this growing Islamic problem in Britain, we must acknowledge the interconnected nature of this religion, from how drug dealers and home office employees are all working together to advance their faith and racial groups within that overarching religion. We are constantly told to take people on an individual basis, but time and time again in Modern Britain this has shown to be dangerously faulty reasoning. It’s outdated and only conceivably worked when the country was homogenous and dwelt under a Christian understanding. Those days are gone. In an irreligious and deracinated Britain, we are at the mercy of monolithic minorities who use the law to cudgel each other and especially the native population.
I had said in a previous piece that I was unsure of the civilisational war proposed by the counter-jihad movement, and I still hold that belief. I do not believe in siding with foreign interests outside of Europe that seek to interfere in the Islamic world instead of focusing on problems at home. The priority is removing Islam from Britain and more broadly Europe, not fighting Israel’s wars or throwing our lot in with Zionists. The European and Islamic civilisations should be separate and distinct.
-
Roe v Wade Reaction
The news that the US Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade has divided opinion. Here is our first debate piece on the issue: we have two different views from two different young women about the issue.
Pro-Choice:
Olivia Lever is the director of Blue Beyond. You can follow her at @liv_lever on Twitter:
‘I feel very annoyed and frustrated. A woman should have the right to choose in the 2022, and the state should never have interference over a woman’s body – it is very similar to the vaccine debate, the state should have no say in what you do with your body. In a practical sense, sex education and social infrastructure in the States is very poor.
On a post note, there is no mention of social infrastructure being made better to help those that have to have babies not be struck down by the financial burden or making sure that these children don’t have less of a life than they should. The whole thing is so poorly thought out, plus the US is supposed to be secular. It’s the constitutional principle. We could lose same-sex marriage and gay marriage. It’s stupid to lose contraception seeing as it prevents abortion.’
Pro-Life:
@BeatriceSEM takes the opposite view:
‘Absolutely delighted and feeling pretty emotional. The number of babies who will now be given a chance at life is massive! I hope very much other countries follow suit!’
