LET’S START WITH the good news. A team of Dutch scientists has discovered this week that the universe will come to an end much sooner than previously anticipated. What a relief.

Researchers from Radboud University, a little-known but definitely real university, found that we’ve still got 10 to the power of 78 years (that’s a one with 78 zeroes on the end of it). That may sound like a long way away, but it’s actually been revised downwards from 10 to the power of 1,100 years, so let’s call it a win.

While we wait for the end times to begin in earnest, we might as well have a look at what’s happening in the world this week. The afterglow of last week’s conclave has faded at last, and we must return to the drudgery of the regular news. 

Seeing as how we endured Brexit and the wave of imperialist attitudes that washed over our way like Sellafield runoff during a decade and a half of Tory government, one would imagine the Irish might be inured to the toxicity and ignorance that often seem to serve as the cornerstones of British politics.

As it turns out, Keir Starmer’s Labour have simply been waiting in the wings to bring their own brand of venom to the public discourse. This week, Starmer unveiled his plan to crack down on immigration, ramping up the sort of accusatory, dehumanising rhetoric that lends a plausible deniability to those who’d paint their xenophobia as a matter of reasonable concerns. “If you want to live in the UK, you should speak English. That’s common sense,” Starmer tweeted last week in the lead-up to his big speech.

On Wednesday, he fired off another. This time it was: “I’ve already returned over 24,000 people with no right to be here. And I won’t stop there.” Add a few cryptic symbols and you’ve got yourself a letter from the Zodiac Killer. 

So stark has been Starmer’s language, he and multiple allies have felt compelled to publicly reject comparisons between Starmer’s speech and the infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech delivered by Enoch Powell in 1968. Starmer has clearly been trying to coin his own catchphrase – repeating the threat that Britain is becoming “an island of strangers” so many times that the only thing everyone in Britain will soon have in common is the desire for Keir Starmer to stop talking.

Among those who are surely pleased with Starmer’s hard-right turn on immigration are those who set the terms of debate. In this case, that means Nigel Farage and his Reform party, who recently won their first mayoralties, took over several county councils, and recently replaced Labour as the most popular party in YouGov polling. Starmer, on the other hand, has seen his approval rating fall to its lowest level ever. 

After all, why would anyone support Labour when Labour is just doing what Reform would do? Why would voters, watching Nigel Farage play the panflute like some horrible little imp while Keir Starmer jigs fulsomely to his odious tune, choose to side with the dancing monkey over the pied piper?

Nigel Farage with newly elected Reform MP for Runcorn Sarah Pochin Nigel Farage with newly elected Reform MP for Runcorn Sarah Pochin

What is more concerning about this trend is that Starmer’s immigration crackdown is not without parallel in Ireland. Minister for Justice Jim ‘Big Jim’ O’Callaghan has, on two separate occasions, taken to Twitter to alert the public to deportation flights. While O’Callaghan’s tweets are nowhere near as gleeful nor as vicious as Starmer’s remarks, the PR-ification of deportation is a move in the dangerous direction — not least because borrowing the rhetoric of the far right doesn’t save you from the far right. That’s just what it looks like when the far right is winning. 

Movements across the water are of particular importance at the moment, in light of Sinn Féin’s sprint to rewrite its own stance on LGBT+ issues following the UK’s Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not entitled to the same rights and protections as cis women under the Equal Rights Act. 

Sinn Féin’s own members have expressed concern about the party’s seeming potentially harsh change in direction when it comes to supporting the trans community. Sinn Féin health spokesperson David Cullinane caused consternation when he called the UK Supreme Court’s decision a “common sense judgment”. Cullinane quickly deleted his tweet and apologised for its tone, but his party colleague and party chief whip Pádraig Mac Lochlainn then went on the radio to say much the same thing.

Presenting themselves as utterly in thrall to the ruling of the UK’s Supreme Court seems highly out of character for Sinn Féin. Their flip-flopping on whether they are fronting up the Irish division of the trans moral panic comes at a time when the Irish government has acknowledged that trans healthcare in Ireland actually needs to improve.

Sinn Féin is set to hold a conference next month specifically to discuss its stance on trans rights, an unholy waste of time in the context of leading the Opposition in a country where virtually every major sector of life – economy, healthcare, education, transport, housing, security – could be improved upon without obsessing over pretty much anyone’s genitalia. 

Mary Lou McDonald’s party surely feels embittered having lost out on a slice of government the last two elections in a row despite quite clearly being the strongest major party on housing, the issue that matters most to the Irish people. It is only natural that they are now seeking to cast the net beyond the corners they have covered (housing, United Ireland). Why they have settled on Telegraph wet dream issues rather than the kind of things that would actually improve quality of life in Ireland, however, is still somewhat of a headscratcher.

And to top it all off, we didn’t qualify for Eurovision. Sweden is probably going to break our Eurovision wins record during a contest that we can’t even watch in good conscience because they won’t throw Israel out of it.

Maybe next year RTÉ can be the one national broadcaster in Europe to show some degree of backbone on the matter and truly boycott the Eurovision until it enforces its own rules against Israel. It’s a win-win for Kevin Bakhurst really, since there’s so little hope of us qualifying for the final in the first place.

Or maybe next year we can let the UK Supreme Court pick our entry for us. Whatever works.