Should Germany have nuclear weapons? Let’s just hold off for a while longer

Over lunch, as I lamented Europe’s pitiful effort in the Ukraine war, a German friend asked me whether I believed that it was time for Berlin to become a nuclear power. The question stopped me in my tracks. I had been arguing that Europe needed to carry its weight in the fight against dictators, but he had called my bluff. Well hold on a minute, I said, I’m not sure we trust Germany that much!

Is this paranoia reasonable or were we all raised on too much Basil Fawlty? Well, two weeks later, I find myself reading about the “Reichsbürger” movement – a label for a plethora of far-right groups who wish to live in the old Reich and believe that the modern German state is a private company founded by the Allies. A group of them were busted this week having apparently been involved in planning to storm the Reichstag, mount a coup and install an old Thuringian prince, currently a real estate developer, as Kaiser.

What’s striking is that this was not a lone wolf operation: there are 54 suspects and counting, 25 already under arrest. The Reichsbürger movement is thought to count former police, civil servants and intelligence officers in its numbers and has periodically spawned terrorist cells and popped up in serving units of the German army. Since 2019, according to the German government, it has also begun to exchange ideas with American Qanon conspiracy theorists, of the kind who stormed the Capitol and think that Donald Trump was trying to save the US from a secret cabal of Satanic paedophiles.

Do these extremists look genuinely ready to seize power in Germany any time soon? I doubt it. But let’s just hold out on the nukes a bit longer, shall we?

When I was in school learning to write, we had to begin by doing two things: drawing a margin using a ruler and putting the date on the page. In the impatient state of childhood, where dates outside birthdays and Christmas have rather little meaning, I found this tiresome, but did as I was told. For some years at university, I lost this discipline, only to regain it as a reporter when it became essential for navigating my own notebooks.

To my surprise, it is not a discipline that has been widely propagated in policy circles. Major political parties, think tanks and campaign groups routinely fail to include even the month or year on their reports and speeches, even when they are timesensitive or include analysis of the latest available data.

Sometimes, they will display the publication date on their website, but this means the information is lost when the downloaded file is circulated and this context will almost certainly disappear on defunct websites in future when historians or journalists want to look back at it. This is irresponsible and slipshod. If the policy advice or grand announcement is worth hearing about, it’s worth understanding in context. Failing to provide that context is a form of lie by omission.

Reichsbürger is a label for a plethora of far-right groups who wish to live in the old Reich and believe modern Germany is a private company founded by the Allies

Farewell to Ian Blackford, the SNP’S chief bloviator in Westminster, who retired from the job last week. Has it really been only five years? Something strange must have happened to time whenever Mr Blackford took the floor. Minutes stretched into hours, hours into days. And yet the words were always the same, in various configurations: “Everyone is ignoring Scotland! No one listens to Scotland! Scotland ... [pause] ... must have a voice!” With a young, svelte new leader in place, we may finally find out what it is “Scotland” actually wants to say.