Stay in the Room Podcast

Stay in the Room
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Stay In The Room Because the people who leave are the ones who lose Political analysis at home and abroad — power, fragmentation, and the case for staying in the conversation davidpreston.substack.com

  1. 1d ago

    The Bargain

    On a glacier, you rope up. Four or five people tied together several metres apart, walking across snow that may be hiding a crevasse. Nobody knows exactly where the holes are or who will step on one. That is the whole point of the rope: it doesn’t protect the strongest or the weakest, it protects whoever happens to go through. It only works if two things are true. The rope has to be kept close to taut, with no loops of slack lying in the snow, because slack is distance and every metre of it is a metre the falling climber drops before anyone feels the pull. And everyone else has to be ready to drop and hold. So the fast walkers at the front don’t surge ahead, and the tired ones at the back don’t stop. Everyone keeps the rope working, all the time, for a fall that may never come. Nobody gets their own pace, and nobody is quite comfortable. Britain is a roped party. The crevasse is old age: the day you might need help getting washed, dressed and safely through the day. The government’s own estimate is that around three in four people over 65 will need care and support at some point. That isn’t an even risk. The older you get, the likelier the fall. But nobody knows when, or for how long, or what it will cost. For most of my adult life we’ve walked across that snow with loops of slack at our feet and everyone arguing about who’s holding the others back. On 29 September a change was put on the table. At Labour conference in Liverpool, Andy Burnham announced that from April 2030 the state pension will rise each year by inflation or 2.5 per cent, whichever is higher, with a separate mechanism to keep it in line with earnings over time. The savings are to build a National Care Service providing free personal care for older people, based on need rather than ability to pay. The triple lock stays as it is for the rest of this parliament. He told the hall he accepted he might pay a political price. The government called it “a new settlement for older people”. Settlement is the right word. It has two sides, and it has a hole in it. What is actually on the table The triple lock has cost far more than anyone planned. When it came in, its extra cost over a plain earnings link was put at around £5.2 billion a year by the end of this decade. The Office for Budget Responsibility reckoned last year the figure would be about £15.5 billion. Inflation and wages have bounced around so much that the “whichever is highest” rule kept handing out rises bigger than earnings growth, and none of that lead was ever given back. That is what goes. Not the floor, which stays: a pension that never loses value to inflation and never rises by less than 2.5 per cent is still unusually strong protection. Not the link to earnings either, which the Institute for Fiscal Studies expects to hold over the long run. What goes is the ratchet. Under the old rule, every year that inflation or the 2.5 per cent minimum beat earnings growth, the pension moved further ahead of wages, and stayed there for good. The IFS called the change welcome, and calculated that had the new formula been running since 2011, pension spending this year would be about £9 billion lower. Here is the hole. The government’s own analysis puts the savings at around £15 billion a year by the end of the 2030s, about £11 billion in today’s money, and much more after that. But they are small for years before they are large, and the IFS has been blunt that stopping a future cost from growing is not the same as finding new money. The savings can help build up a care service. On their own, they don’t pay for one. The government’s answer is that the service will be fully funded, not through borrowing, and phased in as the savings grow and as staff and providers are found. Baroness Casey is due to report next summer on how and when. That is a commitment. It is not yet a costed plan, and the difference matters. Hold on to that distinction, because the rest of this piece depends on it. The two sides If you are drawing a state pension, or close to it, you paid in. Often for forty years or more, in jobs that wore your body out. The pension is not lavish: ministers put the full new state pension at roughly 30 per cent of median earnings, and plenty of people don’t get the full amount. Pensioner poverty is far lower than in the late 1990s, when close to three in ten pensioners were poor after housing costs, but the latest estimate is still around one in seven. I accept all of that, and nothing later in this piece takes it back. The deal still makes sense. What older people are being asked to give up is the ratchet. What they get is protection against the cost of personal care: help with washing, dressing, eating, getting safely through the day. That is the bill that turns a manageable old age into a frightening one. It won’t make a care home free. The government is clear that bed and board stay outside the service, with existing means-tested council contributions. But it takes away a large part of the exposure, and it takes away the part nobody can plan for. What younger people are being asked to accept is that the floor stays. They keep paying, through National Insurance, for today’s pensions, which rise every year and are protected against inflation. There’s no pot with their name on it. The state pension is paid for as it goes: each generation supports the one before, on the understanding that the next will support it. In return, the pension stops being ratcheted permanently ahead of their wages. It can still run ahead for a while, because the 2.5 per cent floor will sometimes beat earnings growth. The pension doesn’t fall back. It keeps rising, and earnings catch up with it. And they stop being cast as the generation coming for your money. This is not a swap where everyone gets back what they put in. An older homeowner who never needs care gives up the ratchet and never uses the service. A young renter on low pay, with no inheritance coming, keeps paying in with far less chance of building the security their parents had. The deal doesn’t pretend otherwise. It is a settlement about sharing a risk, not an exchange between individuals. That’s what a rope is. You don’t tie on because you expect to fall. You tie on because somebody might. I’m 55. I spent more than a decade working winter seasons in the French Alps, as a chef, a chalet host and a driver, to fund a skiing life I’d had since childhood. Brexit ended that. My vote didn’t save it and nobody compensated me for it. I live in a three-bedroom semi in Buckshaw Village worth about £225,000. The same house would cost a great deal more across much of the South East. I’m not one of the people the current arrangement has made comfortable. So when I ask younger readers not to take a hammer to the thing that will keep me upright when I’m old, and ask older readers to let the ratchet go, I’m asking it from the middle of the rope. It isn’t really about age The Resolution Foundation’s latest wealth audit puts the gap in typical wealth between people in their early thirties and people in their early sixties at around £310,000, more than double what it was in the mid-2000s. That looks like old against young. Mostly it’s about assets: pension pots and property, both of which have grown in value for the people who already held them. Place matters as much as age. In the same research, median wealth per adult is about £290,000 in the South East and about £110,000 in the North East. A pensioner renting a flat in Middlesbrough and a pensioner with a paid-off house in Surrey are both “older people”. They are not in the same position. What we have is inequality wearing an age label. Some of the old have done extremely well, and some of the young will inherit extremely well. But the Resolution Foundation found that only around a third of adults have received or expect a significant inheritance or gift, and that the typical age at which today’s young adults are projected to inherit is 61. For most people that’s well after t… Get full access to Stay in the Room at davidpreston.substack.com/subscribe

    The Bargain

  2. 1d ago

    The Bargain

    On a glacier, you rope up. Four or five people tied together several metres apart, walking across snow that may be hiding a crevasse. Nobody knows exactly where the holes are or who will step on one. That is the whole point of the rope: it doesn’t protect the strongest or the weakest, it protects whoever happens to go through. It only works if two things are true. The rope has to be kept close to taut, with no loops of slack lying in the snow, because slack is distance and every metre of it is a metre the falling climber drops before anyone feels the pull. And everyone else has to be ready to drop and hold. So the fast walkers at the front don’t surge ahead, and the tired ones at the back don’t stop. Everyone keeps the rope working, all the time, for a fall that may never come. Nobody gets their own pace, and nobody is quite comfortable. Britain is a roped party. The crevasse is old age: the day you might need help getting washed, dressed and safely through the day. The government’s own estimate is that around three in four people over 65 will need care and support at some point. That isn’t an even risk. The older you get, the likelier the fall. But nobody knows when, or for how long, or what it will cost. For most of my adult life we’ve walked across that snow with loops of slack at our feet and everyone arguing about who’s holding the others back. On 29 September a change was put on the table. At Labour conference in Liverpool, Andy Burnham announced that from April 2030 the state pension will rise each year by inflation or 2.5 per cent, whichever is higher, with a separate mechanism to keep it in line with earnings over time. The savings are to build a National Care Service providing free personal care for older people, based on need rather than ability to pay. The triple lock stays as it is for the rest of this parliament. He told the hall he accepted he might pay a political price. The government called it “a new settlement for older people”. Settlement is the right word. It has two sides, and it has a hole in it. What is actually on the table The triple lock has cost far more than anyone planned. When it came in, its extra cost over a plain earnings link was put at around £5.2 billion a year by the end of this decade. The Office for Budget Responsibility reckoned last year the figure would be about £15.5 billion. Inflation and wages have bounced around so much that the “whichever is highest” rule kept handing out rises bigger than earnings growth, and none of that lead was ever given back. That is what goes. Not the floor, which stays: a pension that never loses value to inflation and never rises by less than 2.5 per cent is still unusually strong protection. Not the link to earnings either, which the Institute for Fiscal Studies expects to hold over the long run. What goes is the ratchet. Under the old rule, every year that inflation or the 2.5 per cent minimum beat earnings growth, the pension moved further ahead of wages, and stayed there for good. The IFS called the change welcome, and calculated that had the new formula been running since 2011, pension spending this year would be about £9 billion lower. Here is the hole. The government’s own analysis puts the savings at around £15 billion a year by the end of the 2030s, about £11 billion in today’s money, and much more after that. But they are small for years before they are large, and the IFS has been blunt that stopping a future cost from growing is not the same as finding new money. The savings can help build up a care service. On their own, they don’t pay for one. The government’s answer is that the service will be fully funded, not through borrowing, and phased in as the savings grow and as staff and providers are found. Baroness Casey is due to report next summer on how and when. That is a commitment. It is not yet a costed plan, and the difference matters. Hold on to that distinction, because the rest of this piece depends on it. The two sides If you are drawing a state pension, or close to it, you paid in. Often for forty years or more, in jobs that wore your body out. The pension is not lavish: ministers put the full new state pension at roughly 30 per cent of median earnings, and plenty of people don’t get the full amount. Pensioner poverty is far lower than in the late 1990s, when close to three in ten pensioners were poor after housing costs, but the latest estimate is still around one in seven. I accept all of that, and nothing later in this piece takes it back. The deal still makes sense. What older people are being asked to give up is the ratchet. What they get is protection against the cost of personal care: help with washing, dressing, eating, getting safely through the day. That is the bill that turns a manageable old age into a frightening one. It won’t make a care home free. The government is clear that bed and board stay outside the service, with existing means-tested council contributions. But it takes away a large part of the exposure, and it takes away the part nobody can plan for. What younger people are being asked to accept is that the floor stays. They keep paying, through National Insurance, for today’s pensions, which rise every year and are protected against inflation. There’s no pot with their name on it. The state pension is paid for as it goes: each generation supports the one before, on the understanding that the next will support it. In return, the pension stops being ratcheted permanently ahead of their wages. It can still run ahead for a while, because the 2.5 per cent floor will sometimes beat earnings growth. The pension doesn’t fall back. It keeps rising, and earnings catch up with it. And they stop being cast as the generation coming for your money. This is not a swap where everyone gets back what they put in. An older homeowner who never needs care gives up the ratchet and never uses the service. A young renter on low pay, with no inheritance coming, keeps paying in with far less chance of building the security their parents had. The deal doesn’t pretend otherwise. It is a settlement about sharing a risk, not an exchange between individuals. That’s what a rope is. You don’t tie on because you expect to fall. You tie on because somebody might. I’m 55. I spent more than a decade working winter seasons in the French Alps, as a chef, a chalet host and a driver, to fund a skiing life I’d had since childhood. Brexit ended that. My vote didn’t save it and nobody compensated me for it. I live in a three-bedroom semi in Buckshaw Village worth about £225,000. The same house would cost a great deal more across much of the South East. I’m not one of the people the current arrangement has made comfortable. So when I ask younger readers not to take a hammer to the thing that will keep me upright when I’m old, and ask older readers to let the ratchet go, I’m asking it from the middle of the rope. It isn’t really about age The Resolution Foundation’s latest wealth audit puts the gap in typical wealth between people in their early thirties and people in their early sixties at around £310,000, more than double what it was in the mid-2000s. That looks like old against young. Mostly it’s about assets: pension pots and property, both of which have grown in value for the people who already held them. Place matters as much as age. In the same research, median wealth per adult is about £290,000 in the South East and about £110,000 in the North East. A pensioner renting a flat in Middlesbrough and a pensioner with a paid-off house in Surrey are both “older people”. They are not in the same position. What we have is inequality wearing an age label. Some of the old have done extremely well, and some of the young will inherit extremely well. But the Resolution Foundation found that only around a third of adults have received or expect a significant inheritance or gift, and that the typical age at which today’s young adults are projected to inherit is 61. For most people that’s well after t… Get full access to Stay in the Room at davidpreston.substack.com/subscribe

    The Bargain

  3. 5d ago

    The Third Family

    The Third Family Two nuclear powers are weakening the rules, and Europe is being invited to do the same. Breaking them would cost it the only thing holding it together. In October, at Lubmin on Germany’s Baltic coast, the far-right AfD held a conference beside the idle terminal that used to take Russian gas from Nord Stream. One of its Bundestag members called for the plant to be restarted and hoped his Polish guest had no objection. Grzegorz Braun, leader of the Confederation of the Polish Crown, said his party wanted to become shareholders in the reconstruction. Then he borrowed a line from Apocalypse Now: “I love the smell of Russian gas in the morning.” Then the Wall Street Journal reported Washington’s proposal. Russian gas would flow back into Europe through the old pipelines across Ukraine, sold through an American intermediary to get round European sanctions, with the proceeds held in escrow and a lucrative opening for American investors. The administration, the Journal reported, is wagering that European resistance will prove “less rigid than meets the eye”. This project supports Ukraine’s right to defend itself and Europe’s security. It holds every source to the same evidence standard, including its own side. Two families Think of it as two crime families. The Kremlin has treated international law as optional since it seized Crimea in 2014; the Trump White House does it by deal. They threaten each other, trade with each other, and share a contempt for any rule that binds the strong. Some of the second family’s methods are reported; others are only alleged. Washington has kept up a naval blockade of Iranian ports since July. US forces carried out limited strikes near the Strait of Hormuz on 2 November, described as defensive. Plans for a renewed campaign have been drawn up; Trump says he has no immediate plan to launch one, while JD Vance writes to Tehran offering talks. In Poland, local reporting alleges that Trump privately urged the defence minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, to leave the governing coalition and side with the right. Kosiniak-Kamysz has confirmed the meeting but not the proposal. In Romania, Anne Applebaum reports in The Atlantic, the US ambassador to Greece pressed the case for American liquefied gas. The prime minister declined a contract because the price was not competitive. Within months a coalition party, whose leader the ambassador had been filmed dining with, joined the far right in a no-confidence vote that brought him down. Its leader denies any American influence. Nobody has shown cause, but the sequence makes Europeans nervous. Then there is the bill. According to the EU, as the Wall Street Journal reports it, the Iran war has cost Europe an extra 100 billion euros in energy. Reuters has reported protests over fuel prices and living costs this autumn in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Some of the parties seeking to capitalise on that anger want Russian energy back: Roberto Vannacci’s new party in Italy, Braun’s in Poland, and in Germany the AfD, which leads the latest INSA poll on 29 per cent. Put that together and a business model comes into view. The war has pushed up Europe’s bill, and Washington proposes Russian gas as the relief, through an American middleman. My own reading, not anything reported, is that American suppliers also do well while the shock lasts. What the figures show is the scale of Europe’s dependence: the energy analysts IEEFA expect the US to supply two-thirds of continental Europe’s liquefied gas imports this year. None of this needs a conspiracy, and families is a loose word: neither the White House nor the Kremlin is a single will, and Europe’s nationalist right is less coherent still. Moscow even cheers Polish parties that loathe Russia. But their separate actions push the same way, weakening the EU’s legal order, which stands between each of them and separate countries easier to bargain with one at a time. The trap Here is the argument at full strength. A rule-follower facing two rule-breakers is bled out slowly, obeying the law while its energy is priced against it and its streets fill. Push that far enough and Europe has to choose: keep the rules and lose, or break them and survive. Become the third family. Here is what would prove this piece wrong. If member states start buying Russian gas outside EU law this winter, or Brussels suspends its own rules to cope, then on the question that matters most this winter the choice is real. The hardest case is Poland. On the night of 30 October a group of judges elected by the current parliament suspended the head of the constitutional tribunal, a former minister in the nationalist Law and Justice government, and took control of the court. President Karol Nawrocki, who has refused to swear in five of the new judges, turned his plane round and pushed his way into the building. Donald Tusk is right on the appointments. In October the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission said the president’s refusal should not stop the new judges taking their seats. An older ruling, on a different appointment, sets the principle: in 2021 the European Court of Human Rights found that a tribunal bench including an improperly elected judge was not a lawful court. That does not settle the legality of what those judges did next, and his own side doubts it. The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights calls the legal basis for the suspension questionable, and Marcin Matczak, a law professor and fierce critic of Law and Justice, calls it non-existent. Tusk’s answer: “There is no other way.” And it started in 2015, when both the outgoing centrist government and the incoming nationalist one made legally questionable moves to stack the court. So Poland is the trap made real. A government defending the rule of law has stepped to its edge, and its opponents have the word they wanted. Dmitry Medvedev called it a constitutional coup. My judgement is that Tusk took a necessary risk. In Hungary, Péter Magyar won a two-thirds majority in April and used it in July to amend the constitution and remove the Orbán-era president, who could have referred his reforms to the constitutional court. Hard-edged, but constitutional, because he had the votes. Tusk does not. Overriding a presidential veto in Poland takes three-fifths of the Sejm, which his coalition lacks. Waiting for next year’s election could mean losing the court for good. But the price is real, and it will be paid on the street: anyone who wants to tell Poles they have been betrayed has just been handed a story. Why the choice is false Poland shows what bending the rules costs, not that Europe must break them. The EU is not a state. It has no army, no single sovereign and no general power to suspend its treaties and restore them later. Its emergency provisions work inside the treaties, not above them. It is twenty-seven countries held together by treaties and courts. Its coherence is the rule of law. The day Brussels deliberately sets its treaty obligations aside, Robert Fico, or a nationalist government in Warsaw or Paris, can say the treaties no longer bind them either. Breaking the law to save the Union would hand them the argument. And the law has more room in it than the trap admits, though it matters who is acting. Ukraine, as the state attacked, may defend itself and take countermeasures against Russia, and other states may help it, at its request and within limits, under the UN Charter’s right of collective self-defence. Whether countries not directly injured may take countermeasures of their own is contested, so EU sanctions rest on the Union’s own treaty powers. Europe is also a lawmaker. The ban on Russian gas, approved in January, phases out liquefied imports from the start of 2027 and pipeline gas from autumn 2027. That is law Europe chose to make. The frozen Russian assets show the same habit. The EU has kept them immobilised rather than seize them, and separately agreed a 90 billion euro loan for Ukraine, funded through EU bor… Get full access to Stay in the Room at davidpreston.substack.com/subscribe

    The Third Family

  4. Oct 30

    Two Rooms

    The argument about Ukraine has split into two rooms, each sure the other is selling propaganda. They agree on more than they admit, and much of what divides them can be checked. This month I spent a few days in Slovenia, in the museums of Ljubljana and at Lake Bled. A year ago it was Dubrovnik. Both were republics of Yugoslavia, which Tito took down its own communist road after breaking with Stalin in 1948, outside the Warsaw Pact. Both declared independence in 1991, and their exits could hardly have been more different. Slovenia’s war lasted ten days. Croatia’s lasted until 1995, and Dubrovnik was shelled. What I took away from both places was not a thesis. It was a question. Whose story is this? Not Moscow’s, not Washington’s, not NATO’s. It belongs to the people who live there. Then I came home to an argument about Ukraine that mostly leaves that question out. This project supports Ukraine’s right to defend itself and Europe’s security. It holds every source to the same evidence standard, including its own side. Two rooms In one room sit Sarah Paine, the war college historian, Ben Hodges, who commanded the US Army in Europe, and Zelensky himself. In the other sit Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer and Yanis Varoufakis, most recently on Glenn Diesen’s channel. These are not schools of thought, and each room’s members disagree about plenty. Each group shares only its answer to one question: keep backing Ukraine’s fight, or push for a settlement now. Call them the deterrence camp and the settlement camp. The hosts differ. Diesen tends to state the conclusion and invite agreement. Steven Bartlett, who interviewed Paine and Zelensky, is warm rather than combative, but he put the other side’s case to both. Both rooms, though, have a word for the other. Paine says the argument about NATO expansion is a story Moscow made up. Diesen calls the people fact-checking him “war propagandists”. It helps to separate the tradition from the messenger. Diesen has a record: years as an RT contributor and a seat at Russia’s Valdai Club. Mearsheimer has no such tie, and his case about NATO has been public since at least 2015. The realist argument deserves to be met on its merits, whoever is hosting it. Here is what would prove me wrong. The most argued-over episode of the war is the peace talks in Istanbul in spring 2022, and each room has a story about why they failed. One says Washington and London stopped a deal. The other says Moscow’s terms made any deal impossible. If the documents put the decisive weight on either cause, that room’s account of Istanbul stands, and mine falls. Common ground Both think the post-1945 order is ending, the Iran war was a blunder, and Europe has no seat at the table. Hodges and Sachs say it from opposite ends; Moscow says the next round of talks will remain trilateral, without EU representatives. The most useful overlap is narrower. Inside Ukraine, both rooms predict that Russia will keep taking territory wherever the price looks bearable. Paine puts it down to imperial appetite. Mearsheimer puts it down to fear: no promise can be trusted, so land is security, and Odessa is worth having “if they can at some reasonable cost”. Beyond Ukraine, the predictions part company. Paine expects an empire to keep going. Mearsheimer expects a frightened great power to stop once it feels safe. The explanations point to different levers. You deter an appetite by making it fail. You might calm a fear with guarantees. What the record settles On October 28 Mearsheimer said Russia was making significant progress and would roll up Zaporizhzhia within a couple of months. The forecast cannot be tested yet. The claim about the present can. ISW’s assessment of October 16 has Russia taking about 100 square kilometres this year, with a net loss of 122 since September 1. As of that date, the map did not show the significant progress Mearsheimer was describing. He also says Russia is losing fewer men than Ukraine. Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian service have confirmed 282,993 Russian dead by name. UALosses, an open-source Ukrainian count, lists about 116,000 Ukrainian dead by name and 106,000 missing. The named-death counts point the other way, with nearly two and a half times as many Russian deaths identified. But the counts are incomplete, the methods differ, and neither includes the wounded. They cannot establish which side is suffering the greater total losses. He is right about something else. Ukraine is short of soldiers. By July 2025 prosecutors had opened about 203,000 criminal cases for unauthorised absence and 50,000 for desertion since 2022. Those are proceedings, not people: about 17,000 had been charged. The Prosecutor General no longer publishes the figures, citing national security. The deterrence room has its own soft spot: the hope that economic strain will end the war. The strain is real. Paine describes Putin wrecking his country. The central bank held its rate at 14 per cent on October 23. The 2026 deficit estimate has doubled to 3.2 per cent of GDP, and the draft budget gives defence and security 44 per cent of federal spending next year. It is not an economy that has stopped paying for its war, and none of these figures says how long it can keep paying. Paine herself expects Putin to keep going for as long as he lives. Diesen says the polls show most Ukrainians want a negotiated settlement. Wanting talks and accepting terms are different questions. In mid-October the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology tested one specific deal: withdrawing Ukrainian troops from the parts of Donbas they still hold, in exchange for American and European security guarantees. Sixty-one per cent called it completely unacceptable. Thirty-five per cent could live with it. Offered two statements, 78 per cent of one half of the sample chose the one saying Russia will not accept a settlement that leaves a sovereign Ukraine with a strong army, over the one blaming Kyiv for being too uncompromising. Whatever Ukrainians think about talking, most of them turned this trade down. What would Moscow accept? Sachs proposes neutrality and a ceasefire on the current line. In June 2024 Putin set out his terms: Ukraine was to withdraw from all of four regions, including the parts Russia does not hold. This month Zelensky offered a sixty-day ceasefire so Ukraine could hold elections. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov replied: “we do not want a ceasefire”. Public positions are opening bids. But on the public record, the armistice Sachs proposes is not on Moscow’s table. Then Istanbul. Sachs says Washington and London stopped a deal, and “everyone knows that”. Certainty is not evidence. Spring 2022 produced a framework, not a treaty: a neutral Ukraine, guarantees in principle, Crimea set aside. The hard parts stayed open. Ukraine wanted an army of 250,000. Russia offered 85,000. In mid-April Moscow asked for a veto over the very guarantees meant to protect Ukraine from Moscow. The accounts weigh the causes differently. Reports of the New York Times investigation into the drafts describe the guarantees as the most important sticking point and Moscow’s demand for a veto over them, and quote a Ukrainian official saying Kyiv’s team had no interest in continuing. Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko, who reconstructed the talks, decline to rank the causes. They point to Western reluctance to underwrite any guarantee, to Ukraine’s growing confidence once Kyiv held, and to talks that tried to settle too much too soon. They treat Bucha as secondary, because work on the treaty continued after it. They call the claim that the West forced Ukraine out “baseless”. So neither room’s account of Istanbul survives. The record does not show Washington and London killing a finished deal, or establish that Moscow’s terms alone made a deal impossible. It shows a framework with fundamental questions still unresolved, above all the guarantees meant to protect Ukraine from another Russian attack. Varoufakis calls Europe’s fe… Get full access to Stay in the Room at davidpreston.substack.com/subscribe

    Two Rooms

  5. Oct 19

    The Roundabout

    At the end of November 2018 I drove into Lyon from the north, on my way to Les Menuires for the ski season, with everything I owned in the car. Protesters had shut every booth at the toll plaza on the A6 and left a couple of lanes open with the barriers up, so the traffic went through in a long, slow procession. There were flags, fireworks and flares, and riot police waiting in the background. I watched expensive cars being singled out and scratched, and as I went past, someone was trying to set one alight. I sat in the procession and added up what I would lose, and crawled through with everyone else. I was frightened. I also understood them. That is the part I have carried since. The Gilets Jaunes had started out over a rise in fuel tax, and they had picked a target you could stand in front of: the cars of people who would not notice the price. Weekend after weekend, at roundabouts across the south-east, they handed out leaflets, and you did not get through without taking one. They knew what they were angry at, and they knew where to stand. Eight years on, the name is back, and so is the fuel price. In early September a young man with no known political ties posted a TikTok video, angry about the cost of fuel, that proposed a date: Saturday, October 17. Other accounts dressed it up as the return of the Gilets Jaunes. Pupils had already been out for weeks over their schools, and by the day the unions had joined too. Several mobilisations met on one date. By late that night the prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, put arrests at 1,200. In Lyon, rioters set fire to the tourist office on Place Bellecour. In Marseille, several dozen forced open the doors of the city hall and toppled a bust of Marianne. In Limoges, the prefect of Haute-Vienne said the town hall was largely lost to a fire he called deliberate. In Britain, in early September, hundreds of protesters clashed with police in Portsmouth after a dinghy landed. Two nights later masked protesters turned up outside a Portsmouth hotel looking for asylum seekers. They had found the Pakistan under-19 cricket team. So who moved the street? That is four questions: who started it, who made it big, who turned it violent, and who amplified it once it was under way. Hostile states are active in this space, and that is documented. This piece tests the first two: whether the public evidence shows hostile states as the principal driver of the mobilisation and its early spread. Here is what would prove me wrong. If published platform or government data showed state-linked networks driving most of the early reach of the calls to protest in France or Britain, I would be wrong, and I would say so. The other two questions, who turned it violent and what later amplification did, the public evidence does not yet settle. On the road In France the school strand came first. Pupils had been out for about three weeks over teacher shortages, crowded classes and crumbling buildings. The Interior Ministry blamed “ultra-left” groups for the attacks on police and public buildings. Marseille’s mayor condemned the vandals in blunt terms and described the damage as limited. That is the French street: students, unions, fuel-price anger, and a violent fringe the ministry blames and Marseille’s mayor condemns. Britain is a different crowd. Hope Not Hate counted at least 251 anti-migrant events across 77 places between June and December last year. It describes hardened far-right activists standing beside local people “taken in by the promise of safety”. UKIP, Patriotic Alternative and Britain First are among the organisations named. The organised core I can document in Britain is far-right and anti-migrant; in France the ministry blames the ultra-left. These are not mirror images. Handing out the leaflets The leaflet of 2018 is the feed of 2026. The mechanism is old: someone hands you a date and a reason. The distribution is new. A roundabout reaches the cars that pass it; a feed reaches millions, and nobody has to stand there. In France this autumn the leaflet was a TikTok video, and Le Monde traced it to its young author. Two French sites, citing Le Monde, report that Viginum, the French state’s watchdog on foreign digital interference, found only minimal, opportunistic foreign activity around it, of no significant reach. I have not seen that finding at source. Le Monde also found a dozen accounts, all created or renamed on September 9, that shared the call intensively, which it calls a typical practice of automated and coordinated accounts. Nobody has said by whom. A claim travels furthest when nobody has to answer for it. After Southport in 2024, the false name of the suspect was among the first posted by a website called Channel3 Now. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found its Facebook page was run by administrators in Pakistan and the United States, and called the case for Russian involvement “weak at best”. A RUSI analyst, writing personally, judged the Kremlin the likeliest foreign actor but concluded that most of the content was home-produced and the Kremlin “lent a helpful megaphone”. Some of it is not state activity at all. When X began showing account locations last November, some UK-focused pro-Reform and far-right accounts turned out to be based in India, Switzerland and Spain. The data can be skewed, but those are people, not states. I see the same thing in the Facebook groups I use: accounts that behave like bots, posting the same lines at all hours. In those threads the origin is simply assumed: Russia, or Iran. It may be. I have no evidence either way, only a pattern I recognise, and nobody in those threads has any more than that. During the Brexit referendum, patterns like that were what first made me suspect some accounts were pushing lines from outside the country. Suspicion, not proof, then as now. Behaviour tells you that something is automated or coordinated. It does not tell you whose it is. The states I grant the premise in full, and the record is public. On October 7, France’s foreign ministry summoned Iran’s ambassador over what it called a disinformation campaign by the Iranian authorities about the school movement, and named official Iranian Foreign Ministry accounts as the source of false content. Viginum has documented 77 information operations by the Russian network known as Storm-1516 between August 2023 and March 2025, and the foreign ministry condemned them in May 2025. The premise does not carry the conclusion. A French disinformation researcher told one newsletter this week that he saw accounts matching the Storm-1516 pattern join in once the riots were under way. That is secondhand, and what he describes is amplification after the fact. The same newsletter relays a report from the French outlet La Lettre, of an official document attributing the signature of the Iranian regime to French-language accounts that circulated images of the clashes. I have not seen the document. The strongest claim the other way is a France Culture statement by the journalist Frédéric Martel, as relayed by the French tech site Cryptoast. Citing intelligence sources, he said influencers backed or amplified by Iran, Algeria and Russia helped mobilise rioters. I have not heard the broadcast, and the claim is unconfirmed. If it is borne out, it moves towards what would prove me wrong. I have found no public attribution of the violence to a foreign state by any French authority. In Britain, the Home Secretary’s statement to Parliament on October 12 set out Iranian proxies, arson in north London and threats to the Jewish community, which is a different category of activity. It said nothing about the anti-migrant protests, and I have found no attribution of them to Russia or Iran. None of that proves absence. A state does not have to create a grievance to exploit it, or organise a march to make it likelier to turn violent. No public attribution is not the same as no operation, and amplification after the start can still change what happen… Get full access to Stay in the Room at davidpreston.substack.com/subscribe

    The Roundabout

  6. Oct 17

    The Waiting Room

    The Waiting Room The date everyone is watching is November 3. Most of what Europe depends on keeps a different calendar. This project supports Ukraine’s right to defend itself and Europe’s security. It holds every source to the same evidence standard, including its own side. Some of this week’s discussion has said barrels, and has said Starlink was turned off. So, two corrections first, because a hostile reader would find them. The first tranche of Russian diesel in Trump’s deal is 300,000 tonnes, not barrels; Trump wrote tons, and Russia’s deputy prime minister Alexander Novak said tonnes. And Starlink was not turned off over Ukraine. The military Starshield service was speed-capped, so terminals moving faster than roughly 160 kilometres an hour lost their connection. Bad enough. Not the same thing. Start with the appointment board. October 31: Russia’s ban on diesel exports ends. November 3: the United States elects a new House and a third of the Senate. November 6: a Pentagon review of American forces in Europe puts its options in front of US defence secretary Pete Hegseth, with the review itself due to finish in December. January 2027: the new Congress sits. April 7, 2027: the American licence covering Trump’s Russian diesel deal runs out. January 2029: this administration’s term ends. Laid out like that, it looks like a waiting room. A number on the screen, a row of plastic chairs, everyone watching the clock on the wall. It is tempting to read Europe as sitting in that room. Much of what the Trump administration has done since September calls for a response, and the response looks slow. My reading is that European governments are holding back until November 3 tells them whether they face a mood or a settlement. I have found no European government saying so on the record, and two other explanations fit the same delay. Europe may lack the capability, money or agreement to do more, whatever the calendar says. Or it may be hedging on purpose, because an open break with Washington has costs of its own. All three can be true. The election may be the cause, or just a convenient date to hang the delay on. Is this a midterm effect, or the new normal? My argument is that for the decisions Europe has to make, the answer matters less than it feels like it does. A new Congress can change how costly it is for the president to use his powers. It does not remove the dependency underneath them, and the things Europe needs to replace take longer to build than any American electoral cycle lasts. That holds whichever explanation for the delay is right. Here is what would prove it wrong. If by the spring the new Congress has stopped a troop cut the administration wanted, or forced allied weapons sales to restart against the president’s wishes, then the vote changed the structure and not just the mood, and waiting was the right call. Two Clocks in One Room There are two clocks in this waiting room, and only one of them is on the wall. The one on the wall is the political clock: the polling, the count on election night, the week of spin that follows. The other is the strategic clock, and it measures something cruder. How long it takes to build the things you currently borrow. The numbers on that clock measure different things. In a 2025 Defense News survey, most of seventeen experts said Europe already has, or could have within three years, enough satellite communications and unmanned surveillance to fight Russia without American help. That is sufficiency, not a like-for-like replacement. Replacing Patriot batteries takes around seven years, on CSIS’s estimate; a European 2,000-kilometre missile is a development target for the 2030s. CSIS also counts about 850 American aircraft that can refuel others in flight, against 336 in Europe. None of those numbers moves on November 3. An election can change who signs the orders. It cannot shorten a production line. What the Vote Can Change The loud clock is not nothing. Congress already holds two levers that matter to Europe. The defence authorisation act signed in December 2025 does not forbid a troop cut; it puts procedure in the way of one. Before US forces in Europe stay below 76,000 for more than 45 days, or NATO’s top command or major American equipment is handed over, the defence secretary must assess the effect, consult allies and certify to Congress that the move serves the national interest, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the commander of US European Command must each give an independent assessment of the risk. Nothing can proceed for 60 days after that material reaches Congress, with Pentagon funding as the enforcement. NBC News reported in September, citing unnamed officials, that the review is weighing cuts of 25,000 to 40,000 from a presence of about 80,000. On any of the counts in circulation, a cut that size would have to go through that process. The second lever is the Graham Act, the Russia sanctions law that passed the Senate 86 to 11 in August, became law in September and made many sanctions mandatory. Both levers share a design feature. Each has a door marked national interest, and the president walks through it by putting a certification in writing. On October 16, two days before the Graham Act’s measures were due to take effect, that is what happened. The law had created the new tariffs and sanctions; Trump’s order invoked its national-interest waiver to suspend them, while existing sanctions stayed in place. So this is what the midterms can do. A changed Congress will struggle to rewrite these laws over a veto, but it can make each certification cost something, through hearings, subpoenas and conditions on money. Changing the legal power is hard; changing the price of using it is not, and a high enough price changes behaviour. If that happens on the troop floor or weapons sales, it meets the test above. Some levers are harder for Congress to reach. It can try to block an arms sale; it has no straightforward way to make a president approve one. The order in which American stock is allocated is largely an executive decision. The satellite link sits somewhere between the government and a private company, and who controls it is disputed. Mid-October showed how exposed that last one is. On October 14, the Starshield speed cap disrupted the fast interceptor drones Ukraine uses against jet-powered Shaheds. Some of the disruption eased within a day, but on October 16 presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov told the AP the cap itself remained, and on October 17 Zelensky said access was not fully restored. Who set the cap is disputed. Musk says the US military and ultimately the president decide such limits; the White House told Ukrainian officials it does not control SpaceX; Reuters, citing three unnamed officials, reported that the order came from inside the White House, and a senior US official denied it came from Trump. Connectivity back is not the same as capability back, and whoever turned the dial, no vote was involved. The weapons lever has been touched too, though less cleanly than the headlines suggest. On September 3 Trump posted that America was keeping its munitions “for ourselves” and that sales to allies would resume soon, and he told Newsmax on October 15 that sales would resume once American stocks were replenished. No formal order has surfaced. The day after the first post, a NATO spokesperson said equipment bought through PURL, the scheme through which Europeans buy American weapons for Ukraine, was still arriving; that was before the October repeat. The scheme matters: by NATO’s counts it has supplied between two-thirds and three-quarters of the missiles for Ukraine’s Patriot batteries. Article 5, in Three Layers The same gap runs through the commitment that matters most. Article 5’s ambiguity comes in three layers, and only one belongs to Trump. The treaty commits each ally to take “such action as it deems necessary”: seventy-seven years old, doctrine rather than drift. The Ankara summit declaration of J… Get full access to Stay in the Room at davidpreston.substack.com/subscribe

    The Waiting Room

  7. Oct 17

    The Waiting Room

    The Waiting Room The date everyone is watching is November 3. Most of what Europe depends on keeps a different calendar. This project supports Ukraine’s right to defend itself and Europe’s security. It holds every source to the same evidence standard, including its own side. Some of this week’s discussion has said barrels, and has said Starlink was turned off. So, two corrections first, because a hostile reader would find them. The first tranche of Russian diesel in Trump’s deal is 300,000 tonnes, not barrels; Trump wrote tons, and Russia’s deputy prime minister Alexander Novak said tonnes. And Starlink was not turned off over Ukraine. The military Starshield service was speed-capped, so terminals moving faster than roughly 160 kilometres an hour lost their connection. Bad enough. Not the same thing. Start with the appointment board. October 31: Russia’s ban on diesel exports ends. November 3: the United States elects a new House and a third of the Senate. November 6: a Pentagon review of American forces in Europe puts its options in front of US defence secretary Pete Hegseth, with the review itself due to finish in December. January 2027: the new Congress sits. April 7, 2027: the American licence covering Trump’s Russian diesel deal runs out. January 2029: this administration’s term ends. Laid out like that, it looks like a waiting room. A number on the screen, a row of plastic chairs, everyone watching the clock on the wall. It is tempting to read Europe as sitting in that room. Much of what the Trump administration has done since September calls for a response, and the response looks slow. My reading is that European governments are holding back until November 3 tells them whether they face a mood or a settlement. I have found no European government saying so on the record, and two other explanations fit the same delay. Europe may lack the capability, money or agreement to do more, whatever the calendar says. Or it may be hedging on purpose, because an open break with Washington has costs of its own. All three can be true. The election may be the cause, or just a convenient date to hang the delay on. Is this a midterm effect, or the new normal? My argument is that for the decisions Europe has to make, the answer matters less than it feels like it does. A new Congress can change how costly it is for the president to use his powers. It does not remove the dependency underneath them, and the things Europe needs to replace take longer to build than any American electoral cycle lasts. That holds whichever explanation for the delay is right. Here is what would prove it wrong. If by the spring the new Congress has stopped a troop cut the administration wanted, or forced allied weapons sales to restart against the president’s wishes, then the vote changed the structure and not just the mood, and waiting was the right call. Two Clocks in One Room There are two clocks in this waiting room, and only one of them is on the wall. The one on the wall is the political clock: the polling, the count on election night, the week of spin that follows. The other is the strategic clock, and it measures something cruder. How long it takes to build the things you currently borrow. The numbers on that clock measure different things. In a 2025 Defense News survey, most of seventeen experts said Europe already has, or could have within three years, enough satellite communications and unmanned surveillance to fight Russia without American help. That is sufficiency, not a like-for-like replacement. Replacing Patriot batteries takes around seven years, on CSIS’s estimate; a European 2,000-kilometre missile is a development target for the 2030s. CSIS also counts about 850 American aircraft that can refuel others in flight, against 336 in Europe. None of those numbers moves on November 3. An election can change who signs the orders. It cannot shorten a production line. What the Vote Can Change The loud clock is not nothing. Congress already holds two levers that matter to Europe. The defence authorisation act signed in December 2025 does not forbid a troop cut; it puts procedure in the way of one. Before US forces in Europe stay below 76,000 for more than 45 days, or NATO’s top command or major American equipment is handed over, the defence secretary must assess the effect, consult allies and certify to Congress that the move serves the national interest, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the commander of US European Command must each give an independent assessment of the risk. Nothing can proceed for 60 days after that material reaches Congress, with Pentagon funding as the enforcement. NBC News reported in September, citing unnamed officials, that the review is weighing cuts of 25,000 to 40,000 from a presence of about 80,000. On any of the counts in circulation, a cut that size would have to go through that process. The second lever is the Graham Act, the Russia sanctions law that passed the Senate 86 to 11 in August, became law in September and made many sanctions mandatory. Both levers share a design feature. Each has a door marked national interest, and the president walks through it by putting a certification in writing. On October 16, two days before the Graham Act’s measures were due to take effect, that is what happened. The law had created the new tariffs and sanctions; Trump’s order invoked its national-interest waiver to suspend them, while existing sanctions stayed in place. So this is what the midterms can do. A changed Congress will struggle to rewrite these laws over a veto, but it can make each certification cost something, through hearings, subpoenas and conditions on money. Changing the legal power is hard; changing the price of using it is not, and a high enough price changes behaviour. If that happens on the troop floor or weapons sales, it meets the test above. Some levers are harder for Congress to reach. It can try to block an arms sale; it has no straightforward way to make a president approve one. The order in which American stock is allocated is largely an executive decision. The satellite link sits somewhere between the government and a private company, and who controls it is disputed. Mid-October showed how exposed that last one is. On October 14, the Starshield speed cap disrupted the fast interceptor drones Ukraine uses against jet-powered Shaheds. Some of the disruption eased within a day, but on October 16 presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov told the AP the cap itself remained, and on October 17 Zelensky said access was not fully restored. Who set the cap is disputed. Musk says the US military and ultimately the president decide such limits; the White House told Ukrainian officials it does not control SpaceX; Reuters, citing three unnamed officials, reported that the order came from inside the White House, and a senior US official denied it came from Trump. Connectivity back is not the same as capability back, and whoever turned the dial, no vote was involved. The weapons lever has been touched too, though less cleanly than the headlines suggest. On September 3 Trump posted that America was keeping its munitions “for ourselves” and that sales to allies would resume soon, and he told Newsmax on October 15 that sales would resume once American stocks were replenished. No formal order has surfaced. The day after the first post, a NATO spokesperson said equipment bought through PURL, the scheme through which Europeans buy American weapons for Ukraine, was still arriving; that was before the October repeat. The scheme matters: by NATO’s counts it has supplied between two-thirds and three-quarters of the missiles for Ukraine’s Patriot batteries. Article 5, in Three Layers The same gap runs through the commitment that matters most. Article 5’s ambiguity comes in three layers, and only one belongs to Trump. The treaty commits each ally to take “such action as it deems necessary”: seventy-seven years old, doctrine rather than drift. The Ankara summit declaration of J… Get full access to Stay in the Room at davidpreston.substack.com/subscribe

    The Waiting Room

  8. Sep 27

    The Five Thousand Men Who Weren't There

    The Five Thousand Men Who Weren’t There What happens to a movement that has to keep topping itself Earlier this month, in an interview with Tommy Robinson, Daniel Thomas described what he thought his supporters could do to a village in Oxfordshire. “How powerful would it be if 5,000 men surround the camp. We take tents. We sit there for days, and we don’t let them get in.” Thomas, who goes by Danny Tommo, was talking about Piddington, where the government plans to house up to 1,256 male asylum seekers at a former military site. He suggested the blockade could be reinforced from northern England, Scotland and Ireland. The Home Secretary called him a far-right and outright racist and said he would face the full force of the law if his group broke it. Five thousand men. Tents. Days. Nine days later, the movement’s flagship mobilisation took place, and it wasn’t at Piddington. It was at Gosport, chasing a report of a boat that was diverted to Dover instead. Hundreds turned up, in black, faces covered, and shouted at a stretch of coast where nothing arrived. Six people were arrested. Three were later charged. Hundreds is not five thousand. And that gap — between the number that makes the headline and the number that gets out of bed — is not an embarrassing detail attached to this story. I think it is the story. Here is the test I’d want applied to that claim, including by anyone who disagrees with me. If even one of this operation’s checkable claims had landed — if the five thousand had materialised at Piddington, or if a single specific assertion this operation made had survived contact with someone checking it — then what I’m describing is just an organisation that sometimes overpromises, which is every organisation. The reading only holds if the failures are consistent and in the same direction. So watch whether they are. Start with the boat, because the boat is the whole thing in miniature. In April, Thomas bought a small rigid-hulled inflatable with money raised from his followers, named it the Patriot, and said he would use it to police the Channel. In June it sank at the mouth of the Arun, in Littlehampton. He posted a video titled to say the left was trying to seize or destroy it, and told his supporters it had been sabotaged, possibly by left-wing activists. The harbour recovered the wreck and sent him a bill. In September, The Times looked into it and reported that the boat had got into difficulty after developing mechanical problems, and sank. The explanation was mechanical. A fault. By then a new fundraiser was running, for replacement boats and marine equipment. It has raised more than twenty-one thousand pounds. According to The Times, it does not mention that the first boat sank. That is the pattern I think is worth watching, because once you separate audience from capacity the numbers start saying quite different things. A broadcast reaching a hundred thousand viewers is an audience for one video, not a membership. It is a real number attached to a claim it doesn’t support, and the distance between the two is where an audience can be mistaken for a movement. Now, a separation that matters, and that the Home Secretary herself drew. Piddington’s own grievance is not Thomas’s, and the two should not be filed together. A village of 358 people is being asked to live next to accommodation for 1,256 men, in temporary dormitories powered by diesel generators, with water and sewage trucked in. The women of the village wrote to every female MP in the country about it. The parish council is exploring whether the newts and bats on the site might sustain a legal challenge, which is both faintly comic and entirely rational when it is the tool available to you. They held a symbolic referendum on declaring independence and voted overwhelmingly to leave, a result with real feeling behind it and no legal standing whatsoever. That is local politics. People with a concrete objection, using the instruments they have. What Thomas brought to it was a number. Mahmood’s distinction was between residents raising legitimate concerns and activists hijacking those fears, and whatever you think of her, the distinction matters. Collapsing Piddington’s anxiety into Thomas’s arithmetic would do to those residents exactly what his arithmetic does to everything else. Which raises the question of why the numbers keep getting bigger. It isn’t that nobody notices. It’s that noticing costs nothing. Attention in this space goes to whoever is loudest and most continuously present, not to whoever turns out to have been right. A claim that draws a headline has already done its work by the time anyone checks it, and the check reaches a fraction of the people the claim did. So there is no downward pressure on the size of the claim, and considerable upward pressure. Five thousand men is not a forecast. It is a bid. And a bid has to be raised. Which is where this stops being a story about numbers and becomes a story about what the numbers were for. Look again at what Thomas has been asking people to buy into. Not a policy, not an analysis, not really even an opinion. A capacity. We have the men. We can surround the site. We can sit there for days and not let them in. We can go out into the Channel and stop the boats ourselves. Every one of those is a claim about what his movement can physically do. That is an unusual thing to build a political business on, because unlike an opinion it has to exist in the world to be worth anything. Nobody can check a grievance against a car park. A capacity can be checked against a car park, and Gosport was the first public test we got. It was not a controlled one — a different place, a different trigger, a different night — and it does not tell you what Piddington would have drawn. It tells you what this movement put on the ground when it chose its own moment. Which is why the sequence runs the way it does. A crowd is proof. A bigger crowd is better proof. A blockade is better still, because it stops something happening. A boat is better again, because it lets one person perform the capacity a crowd failed to demonstrate. Last Tuesday, off the English coast, Thomas filmed himself on a speedboat beside an inflatable dinghy that had carried people across the Channel. The footage he posted shows him leaning over with a knife and cutting into the dinghy while an emergency responder stands in it, and shouting that they are on English territory. The people who had crossed had already been taken to safety. He has been charged with criminal damage and with failing to disclose the PIN to his phone under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. He denies both. He has elected trial by jury and was refused bail, the judge citing a real possibility of an immediate custodial sentence. He is due at Portsmouth Crown Court on 29 September. Whether he is convicted is for that court and not for me, and nothing here should be read as an opinion on it. But the sequence is a matter of record, whatever the verdict. Five thousand men had become one man in a boat. What that transformation means is my reading rather than an established fact — but the steps down are documented, in order, within a fortnight. This is where Tommy Robinson is worth bringing in, and only as a comparison. Robinson has been sent to prison five times. The striking thing is how little it has cost him. When he was jailed in 2018, the response was a Free Tommy movement that put an estimated fifteen to eighteen thousand people on the street — more than he had drawn before going in. Hope Not Hate’s research director observed in 2024 that the movement was heavily centred on Robinson personally, and it has outlasted every organisation he has been attached to; the English Defence League, which he founded and left, has not marched since 2013. That is what makes Robinson useful as a comparison. His absence can itself become part of the story. The prosecutions can be converted into the thing people are buying, which is why removing him… Get full access to Stay in the Room at davidpreston.substack.com/subscribe

    The Five Thousand Men Who Weren't There
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Stay In The Room Because the people who leave are the ones who lose Political analysis at home and abroad — power, fragmentation, and the case for staying in the conversation davidpreston.substack.com

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    Stay in the Room
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