Federal Powers That Should Not Exist

Americans Are Fighting For Control Of Federal Powers That Shouldn’t Exist

Today’s federal government is almost entirely unconstitutional

It’s no secret that politics in the United States is growing increasingly acrimonious — to the point that a 2022 poll found 43% of Americans think a civil war is a least somewhat likely in the next decade.

But here’s what few people realize: The intensity of our division springs from a federal government operating far beyond the limits of the Constitution — fueling a fight for control over powers that were never supposed to exist at the national level.

To put it another way, if the federal government were confined to its actual granted authorities, federal elections would be of little interest to the general public, because the outcome would be largely irrelevant to their everyday lives.

America’s founders drafted the Constitution with great trepidation. Having just escaped British tyranny, the people of the separate states that would comprise the proposed union were wary of centralizing too much power at the federal level, and thus sowing the seeds of a new tyranny.

They therefore set out to create a federal government to which the states delegated only certain limited powers, with all other subjects of governance reserved to the states.

Those powers — only 18 of them — are listed, one by one, in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. They include such things as the power to raise armies, maintain a navy, declare war, borrow money, coin money, establish punishments for counterfeiters and pirates, set standards of weights and measures, secure patents and establish post offices.

Reassuring those who were considering the enormously consequential decision of whether to ratify the Constitution, James Madison wrote,

“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. [Federal powers] will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce…The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people.”

To win over those would-be ratifiers who still feared the proposed federal government would undercut state sovereignty and infringe individual liberties, ten amendments were drafted — the Bill of Rights. The 10th Amendment codified Madison’s previous assurance about the division of authorities between the federal and state governments:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

We arrive then at a hard fact: Today’s sprawling federal government, which involves itself in almost every aspect of daily American life, is almost entirely unconstitutional.

To rattle off just a random fistful of the federal government’s unauthorized undertakings and entities — brace yourself — there is zero constitutional authority for the Social Security, Medicare, federal drug prohibitions, the Small Business Administration, crop subsidies, the Department of Labor, automotive fuel efficiency standards, climate regulations, the Federal Reserve, union regulation, housing subsidies, the Department of Agriculture, workplace regulations, the Department of Education, federal student loans, the Food and Drug Administration, food stamps, unemployment insurance or light bulb regulations. Even that sampling doesn’t begin to fully account for the scope of the unsanctioned activity.

Don’t let your affinity for any of those enterprises short-circuit your intellectual honesty: Even if you view some of them as benign, that doesn’t render them constitutional. And if you’ve ever invoked the Constitution to spotlight a different kind of government overreach, it would be hypocritical to nod approvingly when it’s violated in ways where you deem the result beneficial.

So how did we get to this place where the intended relationship between federal and state powers has been completely inverted — with a federal government wielding powers that are now “numerous and indefinite” rather than being “few and defined”?

Much of the current state of affairs has been driven by the Supreme Court’s extreme and expansive interpretations of certain clauses of the Constitution. Among the most significant are the General Welfare and Commerce clauses.

The General Welfare Clause, found at the start of Article 1, Section 8, says:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States…

Embedded in a clause focused on the power to tax, the words “general welfare” were meant to ensure that Congress’s taxation and spending would be confined to purposes that were broadly beneficial, rather than catering to narrow or localized interests.

The clause’s language was copied from the Articles of Confederation, where, as Madison explained, “it was always understood as nothing more than a general caption to the specified powers.” Indeed, he said, it was copied for the very reason that its prior use and understanding would hopefully minimize the risk of it being misinterpreted as a grant of power.

It flies in the face of reason that the drafters of the Constitution would take pains to carefully list the Congress’s specific authorities, yet simultaneously say Congress could also do anything it thinks generally beneficial.

Countering those who sought to interpret the clause that way, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “To consider the…phrase…as giving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please, which might be for the good of the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless.”

Clearly, based on context and history, those two words, general welfare, do not bestow an authority. Indeed, they’re present to limit an authority — the power to tax and spend.

The forces seeking to reshape the federal government by exploiting those two words were held at bay, but only for so long. In 1937, the Supreme Court used the imaginatively expansive interpretation of the General Welfare Clause to turn back a constitutional challenge to the Social Security Act — and to set a precedent that would fundamentally change the nature of our federal government.

That decision — Helvering v. Davis — came as the court was under intense institutional duress. Following a wave of high court decisions rightly striking down various pieces of New Deal legislation as unconstitutional, President Roosevelt — emboldened by his massive landslide reelection in 1936 — pushed a legislative scheme that would enable him to appoint as many as six more justices to the Supreme Court.

Whether to derail that plan or to merely cave to the overwhelming public opinion manifested in FDR’s jaw-dropping 523-8 electoral college landslide, the court — thanks in great part to swing-vote Justice Owen J. Roberts — began stamping its approval on New Deal legislation, with Helvering among the first.

Fittingly for a ruling that eviscerated limited government in America, Helvering’s very language had its own air of authoritarianism:

“Congress may spend money in aid of the ‘general welfare.’ There have been great statesmen in our history who have stood for other views. We will not resurrect the contest. It is now settled by decision.”

As if that proclamation didn’t do enough to demolish the concept of limited federal government, the court proceeded to amplify the damage. While acknowledging that determining what falls under “general welfare” requires discretion, the court declared, “the discretion…is not confided to the courts. The discretion belongs to Congress.” Thus, the court not only granted broad new power to Congress, but also limited the extent to which that power would be subject to checks and balances.

We don’t have to imagine how the “Father of the Constitution” would feel about the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the welfare clause. In 1792, Madison wrote, “The federal government has been hitherto limited to the specified powers…If not only the means, but the objects [purposes] are unlimited, the parchment had better be thrown into the fire at once.”

While the Welfare Clause has been abused to expand federal spending power, Commerce Clause abuse has unleashed sprawling federal regulatory power. As with the Welfare Clause, what was meant to curtail government intrusion into the lives of Americans has perversely been used to expand it.

The Commerce Clause gives Congress the power to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” The Supreme Court’s sham interpretation focuses on “among the several states.”

It’s important to consider that the Constitution was drafted to replace the Articles of Confederation. Among the woes that prompted that evolution was the imposition of tariffs by individual states against other states. The Commerce Clause was intended to enable a free trade zone within the union, by empowering Congress to bar interstate tariffs.

“It grew out of the abuse of the power by the importing States in taxing the non-importing,” wrote Madison, “and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government.”

Those working to expand federal authority have argued that “commerce” doesn’t merely apply to trade, but also encompasses manufacturing and agriculture or even “all gainful activity.”

However, in the constitutional ratification debates, the word “commerce” uniformly and narrowly referred only to mercantile trade or exchange — not to manufacturing, agriculture or retail sales, much less to any gainful activity.

Thomas Jefferson underscored the intended scope of the clause:

“The power given to Congress by the Constitution does not extend to the internal regulation of the commerce of a State, (that is to say of the commerce between citizen and citizen,) which remain exclusively with its own legislature; but to its external commerce only, that is to say, its commerce with another State, or with foreign nations, or with the Indian tribes.”

However, the Commerce Clause is now used to justify federal regulation of nearly every aspect of our existence, including activities that happen entirely within a single state. On this front, the Supreme Court did its greatest harm with its 1942 decision in Wickard v Filburn.

In a move that would leave founding farmers aghast, the federal government had fined Ohio farmer Roscoe Filburn for growing more wheat on his small farm than allowed by the Agriculture Adjustment Act of 1938.

Filburn wasn’t even growing the wheat for sale — only to feed his own family and animals, and for future planting. This clearly wasn’t commerce as meant by the Constitution’s authors and ratifiers, to say nothing of the fact that Filburn’s activity lacked any interstate character whatsoever.

That didn’t stop the Supreme Court from upholding the law on Commerce Clause grounds. The court creatively declared that, by choosing not to buy wheat in the marketplace, individuals like Filburn could collectively have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.

As Rand Paul wrote in a 2012 Supreme Court amicus filing, “Wickard stands for the sad proposition that Congress can prevent a man from feeding his family in his own home with food he grew himself.” Of course, it does far more than that, serving as a key precedent that subjects any activity to the federal government’s control and punishment. All that’s needed is a theoretical, tangential link to the economy — something every single aspect of life has to some degree.

We’d be far better off had the founding arrangement endured. The decentralization of power and governance reduces political discord and results in more people being governed in ways they find agreeable. If our federalism matched the constitutional design, we’d see citizens focusing most of their political energy on state and local governments — where they have far more meaningful representation compared to the federal legislature, which now has the average House member representing 761,000 people.

If state law, rather than federal law, were preeminent on the vast majority of topics, we’d also see sharper differentiations in what life is like in each of the 50 states. Americans would be presented with a more diverse selection of places to live, while enjoying the freedom to choose the one that best comports with their views on how things should be.

As it is, the Supreme Court-enabled concentration of power in Washington locks us all into a massive, winner-take-all steel-cage match, forcing us to fight over who gets to impose their philosophy on 332 million people across 3.8 million square miles of territory.

Even when the states comprising the union were far fewer in number and occupied far less territory, the prospect of centralized government was anathema to the likes of George Mason. At Virginia’s ratifying convention, he asked, “Is it to be supposed that one national government will suit so extensive a country, embracing so many climates, and containing inhabitants so very different in manners, habits, and customs?”

How can we close the Pandora’s box the Supreme Court has opened? Though Helvering, Wickard and similar decisions are objectively outrageous, it’s hard to imagine the Supreme Court setting things right by overturning them.

There’s another long-shot avenue — amending the Constitution. Under Article V, a constitutional amendment convention must be convened if two-thirds (34) of the state legislatures call for one. Such a movement is already underway: As I previously covered, 19 states have now requested a convention, with one of the goals being to limit federal jurisdiction and power.

If we don’t bend the union back into proper shape, it will surely break under the pressure of intensifying discontent with concentrated power and one-size-fits-all governance. Barring a burst of constitutional-amendment momentum, expect the country’s simmering secession movements to grow far more substantial and numerous.

Sloshing Them With Martinis

Today's selection -- from Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World by Kwasi Kwarteng. Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener gained everlasting British military fame in Sudan in the Battle of Omdurman when his forces lost fewer than 500 men while killing—some would say slaughtering—about 11,000 and wounding 16,000:


“As head of the Egyptian army, Kitchener was the only candidate for the command of the force which would reconquer Sudan. His hour had come. As Lord Cromer remembered, Kitchener at forty-six was 'young, energetic, ardently and exclusively devoted to his profession'. He also observed, as many others did, that the Sirdar's qualities did not inspire love among his troops. According to Cromer, the 'bonds which united' Kitchener and his subordinates were those of 'stern discipline'. Kitchener had a 'strong and masterful spirit', which he used to dominate his men and bully them to submission to his will, instead of obtaining from them 'the affectionate obedience yielded to the behests of a genial chief'. Kitchener left as little ‘as possible to chance’ and was, in the language of the period, a ‘rigid economist’, which meant that he was very careful with money, suppressing with ‘a heavy hand any tendency towards waste and extravagance’. 


“The most famous description of Kitchener from this period comes from the stirring account of the Sudan campaign written by G. W. Steevens, entitled With Kitchener to Khartoum, which was a bestseller in 1898. A brilliant Oxford Classics graduate, Steevens was a journalist of genius who worked for the newly founded popular newspaper the Daily Mail and wrote with a vividness and fluency which brought him early fame as a war correspondent, before he died in South Africa at the premature age of thirty. His sketch of Kitchener included the line: ‘You feel that he ought to be patented and shown with pride at the Paris International Exhibition. British Empire: Exhibit No. 1 ... the Sudan Machine.’ The ‘Sudan Machine’ was a name that stuck. Steevens referred to the Sirdar's ‘unerring precision’, and it was clear that his characteristics were beginning to fascinate the wider public, as the final resolution of the Sudan conflict became more widely anticipated. A great popular journalist, Steevens appreciated the Victorian public's appetite for supermen and imperial heroes. For him, Kitchener was quite simply ‘the man of destiny’. Against such a man, with the backing of the resources of the imperial government in London, the Khalifa and his followers, it was believed, stood little chance. Lord Cromer had mentioned the inevitability of a British triumph in a letter to Lord Salisbury written in 1892: ‘The very name of England is far more feared by the Khalifa and his Beggara than either Turkey or Egypt, and it is practically admitted that they cannot hope for success in fighting against the British.’

A portrait of Field Marshal Kitchener in full dress uniform taken shortly after being promoted to the rank


“The details of the Sudan campaign, which were recounted in numerous memoirs and descriptions, were once familiar to the British public. The one episode that is still renowned is the Battle of Omdurman, the final stand of the dervishes, made famous by the Charge of the 21st Lancers, the last occasion on which the British army made use of a cavalry charge in battle. Winston Churchill, a young cavalry officer who had cajoled and bullied his way on to Kitchener's campaign, would refer to the charge frequently as one of his repertoire of dinner-table anecdotes. It has become part of British military folklore. The Battle of Omdurman itself, which took place on 2 September 1898, was a heavily lopsided affair: at about six in the morning, the dervishes began their advance on the British position. Their ‘array was perfect’, and a great number of their flags, which had been covered with texts from the Koran, were visible on the horizon. To the young Churchill, ‘their admirable alignment made this division of the Khalifa's army look like the old representations of the Crusaders in the Bayeux tapestry'. The outcome of all this medieval pageantry and theatre was grisly, and, in accounts of the battle, one can almost detect the sense of wonder and shame the British felt in inflicting so much damage on a brave enemy, since the Victorian cult of the hero was more than matched by a passion for 'sportsmanship' and 'good form'. These were, after all, times when the veneration of cricket was perhaps at its height, when the cricket legend W.G. Grace was arguably the most famous man in Britain. The dervishes had been sportsmen: 'our men were perfect, but the Dervishes were superb', recounted Steevens. Churchill admitted that the 'Dervishes fought manfully'. The famous charge, in which 400 cavalrymen of the 21st Lancers attacked a force of what turned out to be 2,500 dervishes, made very little difference to the outcome of the battle, though it led to the award of three Victoria Crosses. In reality the dervishes were 'swept away in thousands by the deadly fire of the rifles and Maxims'. Their losses were 'terrible': out of an army whose strength was estimated at from 40,000 to 50,000 men, some 11,000 were killed, and about 16,000 wounded. The British casualties had been negligible: twenty-two men and NCOs killed, and a hundred wounded, while only two officers lost their lives, one of whom, Lieutenant Robert Grenfell, had been the 'life and soul of the joyous Christmas festivities' at Lord Cramer's house in Cairo the year before. Grenfell had been killed by a 'Dervish broadsword' while taking part in the charge. Colonel Frank Rhodes, a Times journalist and Cecil Rhodes's elder brother, was also wounded in the battle. The Khalifa struggled on for another year before being killed in the Battle of Umm Diwaykarat in November 1899.


“The Battle of Omdurman marks the end of an era of military adventurism and battlefield heroics. It was a day of frightful carnage for the dervish tribesmen, but it would, perhaps ironically, be dwarfed by the 20,000 dead the British themselves suffered on the first day of the Somme, less than eighteen years after Omdurman. Later observers reflected on this macabre symmetry. The constant theme of the battle is the contrast between what the British called civilization, on the one hand, and barbarism on the other. Churchill summed this up when he described Omdurman as the 'most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians.'"

Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World
 
author: Kwasi Kwarteng  
title: Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World  
publisher: PublicAffairs  
date:  
page(s): 227-229

The Romans Conquer Sicily


“From Messena the Romans proceeded, logically enough, to the Aeolian Islands. For a couple of centuries the people of the little town of Lipari had been living prosperously and quietly, but as the Romans drew closer the Aeolians allied themselves to the Carthaginians. General Hannibal won a victory here over the Roman fleet. In vain, for in 252 the Romans occupied the obsidian islet. 


“Lilibaeum's thwarting of Pyrrhus was a tiny hors d'oeuvre to the Carthaginians before the Romans swept down to devour them. For over two hundred years, ever since a treaty of 508 between Rome and Carthage, the two powers had observed an understanding with regard to the North African coast and nearby trade routes. Since then the military environment had changed in two relevant ways. First, in the Battle of Himera in 480 the Greeks had triumphed over the Carthaginians — true, that was two centuries before, but the Carthaginians had never regained their aura of invincibility. Second, the Romans had grown into a powerful nation; now they controlled virtually all the Italic peninsula. Their next logical move would be to cross the strait. Carthage, with a military presence on Sicily, was the most powerful city in the western Mediterranean, and Rome took that as a challenge. 


“From Messena the Roman legions spread relentlessly south and west. In 263 they made a puppet of Siracusae's ruler. The same year they conquered Katane, and then, moving westward into the interior, they won the alliance of Centuripe, and in 258 they sacked Enna. On the south coast, Akragas was now a town of the Carthaginians; the Romans besieged Akragas for six months in 262-61 and finally conquered the city. East of Akragas, the Romans in 258 stumbled on the largely destroyed Camarina, and with equipment supplied by Siracusae flattened what little was standing there. 


“The Romans, rapid and ruthless on land, recognized their inferiority to the Carthaginians on the sea. In 261 an opportunity came to the Romans and they seized it: they captured a Carthaginian ship (a quinquereme, with five levels of oarsmen) and had their carpenters duplicate it exactly, a hundred times ... in just a couple of months. Now the Romans had a fleet worthy of them. 


“On land the Romans continued their advance. Compared to their progressions in the east and south, they encountered greater resistance as they moved westward along the north shore, that is, as they moved closer to the Carthaginians. Still, the Romans conquered: in 252 Thermae Himerae and the following year Panormus, heretofore central to the Carthaginian defenses. In 250 the Romans arrived in great force at Lilibaeum and surrounded her by land and sea. Then they discovered that they absolutely could not breach that famous wall. 

Hannibal Crossing of the Alps


“The Romans established a naval blockade; which they maintained for a year until they lost ninety ships in a defeat up north and decided to leave Lilibaeum temporarily. Roman soldiers found it impossible to reach Lilibaeum by land because of the Carthaginian guerrillas in the interior; from 247 to 242 the Carthaginians were under the command of the skillful Hamilcar Barca from his nest in the hills northeast of Lilibaeum. The Romans renewed their blockade in 242, with two hundred ships, new or newly equipped. 


“The Carthaginians brought in reinforcements. The Romans may have had two hundred ships, but the Carthaginians had twice that number, which they deployed to the west and north of Lilibaeum. 


“Over the waters, dense with ships out to the Egadi Islands, the captains communicated with each other by using smoke signals. Although the Carthaginian ships were bigger and swifter than most of the Roman, the Carthaginians needed more room to maneuver. Bringing in their ships from the north, the Romans immobilized the Carthaginians between the Roman ships and the land. Most of the Carthaginian ships were sunk or captured in this Battle of the Egadi, which the Romans won on March 10, 241 B.C.


“Lilibaeum was now a Roman city. It was clear to all concerned, Romans and Carthaginians alike, that the sea too was now Roman, and therefore also the Sicilian shores where the Carthaginians had a few remaining strongholds. From their redoubt at Eryx, their leader Hamilcar Barca sued for peace. The ensuing treaty gave to Rome all the Carthaginian territory in Sicily and its minor islands, and huge reparations. The Romans had won all of Magna Graecia; here on the west coast of Sicily the Romans grasped the Mediterranean world.

The Carthaginians, now effectively dead as a people, wrote no history.”


Author: Sandra Benjamin
Title: Sicily: Three Thousand Years of Human History
Publisher: Steerforth
Date: Copyright 2024
page(s): 72-74

A Dress That "Shimmered Like The Scales Of A Serpent" -- 1/5/24


Today's encore selection -- from Sargent's Women by Donna M. Lucey. John Singer Sargent was the greatest American portrait painter of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. Dame Alice Ellen Terry was a famous Shakespearean actress in Britain in the 19th century. She was a star! And for her soon-to-be-legendary performance as Lady Macbeth, costume designer Alice Comyns Carr created a dress that "shimmered like 'the scales of a serpent" and inspired one of Sargent's most esteemed paintings.

"Ellen Terry, [was] the greatest stage actress and celebrity [in the late 19th century]. Born into a theatrical family, Terry made her stage debut at the age of nine. She married three times, had a series of lovers ... and gave birth to two children out of wedlock. This sort of behavior by a woman did not generally go over well in Victorian England, but in her case, it added to her fame. (She was eventually appointed a dame of the British Empire.)

"[John Singer] Sargent had painted the forty-two-year-old actress the previous winter. She was then starring as Lady Macbeth in a controver­sial London production. Sargent, an avid theater fan, took in the open­ing performance on December 27, 1888, and audibly gasped upon the actress's first entrance. That dress! It shimmered like 'the scales of a ser­pent,' and hugged Terry's figure like 'soft chain armour.' That had been the intent of the costume designer, Alice Strettell Carr, a friend of both Sargent and Terry. ...

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth

"But the dress hadn't come easily. Carr couldn't find any fabric in England to cre­ate the sensuous yet metallic look she had in mind. She imported fine yarn from Bohemia -- strands of green silk twisted with blue tinsel -- and then crocheted the yarn into a dress based on a thirteenth-century design. It was floor length with large sweeping sleeves, but still lacked the theatri­cal brilliance to project to the final row of the theater. Inspiration came in the form of luminous insects. Carr had countless iridescent beetle wings sewn all over the dress. In a finishing touch, she arranged rubies and diamonds along the edges of the costume to create Celtic-style patterns.

"Upon seeing Terry in that fabulous dress with her hair hanging to her knees -- 'magenta hair!' Sargent exulted in a letter to the art collec­tor Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston -- Sargent knew that he had to paint her in full costume. It took some arm-twisting, but Terry finally relented and arrived by carriage to Sargent's Tire Street studio one soggy morning. (Across the road, Oscar Wilde was riveted as he looked out his library window to witness 'the vision of Lady Macbeth in full regalia magnificently seated in a four-wheeler.' Such 'wonderful possibilities' the street now possessed, Wilde mused.)"

Sargents Women Four Lives Behind the Canvas
 
author: Donna M. Lucey  
title: Sargent's Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas  
publisher: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.  
date: Copyright 2017 by Donna M. Lucey  
page(s): 4-5  

 




 





The New Weimar

The New Weimar?

Taki

December 28, 2023

Hitler and Goebbels visit UFA, 1935

Hitler and Goebbels visit UFA, 1935

Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1990-1002-500 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Living as we are under the collective inferiority of the West, and humbled as we are when faced with the cultural achievements of tribal Africans, primitive Amazonian tribesmen, Saudi Arabian witch doctors, and savages in general, I was relieved to see that Hollywood is hard at work in maintaining the myth that everything that the West has achieved since the Greeks was due to the white man’s cruelty and ability to steal from the Dark Continent.

Now, please don’t get me wrong. I don’t watch the drivel that Tinseltown puts out nowadays, but a bad case of bronchitis had me in bed high up in the Alps, with a cough of a Volga boatman and a high temperature. There was nothing to do but watch TV, as I could not focus on the written word. And what I saw only made my temperature go up—actually, it made me so angry I got better. I will not mention the serial except that it’s been very successful. It takes place out west and the cowboys are all bad, bullies, criminals, sadists, and worst of all, white. The few black cowhands are wise, introspective, and very perceptive with their advice. The victims are the red Indians, sorry, Native tribesmen. One pretty Indian girl teaches history class, and her opening remarks to a new class are what a major criminal Christopher Columbus was. But the best part is the utter awfulness of the whites. They’re greedy, cowardly, murderous, bullying, dishonest, and I’m talking only of the men. The white women are drunks, sleep with everything that walks but the horses, and are very greedy and vengeful. My only thought was thank God I’m watching this in my own bed. In a movie house I’d probably be lynched once the lights went on. Mind you, I only watched less than a segment, and I’m told the characters improve later on.

“Hollywood is at present doing the work UFA films did for Hitler in the ’30s.”

Hollywood is at present doing the work UFA films did for Hitler in the ’30s. Back then, in film after film, the “International Jew” was portrayed as conspiring against Western interests, institutions, and Christian mores. By the time war broke out, there were few Germans who weren’t convinced that the Jews had conspired against them. Now our Jews in Hollywood are doing something along the same lines against the white man, white males having replaced on screen at least the “International Jew” as figures of hate.

Is America going the way of Weimar? Our Jews in Hollywood are not Hitlers, some of them are even nice guys. But they lack talent and courage, they love money, and the easiest way to get it is to follow the woke agenda, it’s as simple as that. Their grandfathers were Mittel-European Jews, uneducated and unsophisticated, but they learned quickly, could spot talent, used it well, and, when war broke out, turned Hollywood into a PR firm for Uncle Sam. These new Harvard guys are smart, well educated, but greedy, cowardly, and willing to debase themselves for woke ideology.

The verdict of history is always too late for those who correctly predict how it will turn out, hence the greatest Greek writer since Homer will abstain. One thing is for sure: Sub-Saharan Africa passed the one billion population mark in 2015, and it is going to more than double to 2.12 billion by 2050. By then it will be ten times what it was when I first visited Africa in the ’50s. The stance of some conservative politicians in Europe to counter an inevitable invasion from Africa is seen as fascist, and politicians who warn against unlimited African immigration as the embodiment of the Duce, if not the Führer. Woke is like the snowplow that opens the road after a heavy snowfall. Why should the whites have Europe to themselves? What have they done to deserve it except enslave people and profit from it? And what about America? The country is too big for a few rich slobs with large yachts and big private planes. Land and wealth need to be redistributed, and now.

The funny thing is, that show I watched while coughing my poor lungs out is all about this: one man with a large ranch, and many without large ranches who want to take it away from him because he did bad things in order to keep it from them in the past. Oy vey, as a Jewish granny would say. But here’s an idea for you Hollywood types. Why not make a movie about one of the bravest men alive, a man who saw action with the famous Rhodesian Light Infantry, acquired a law degree, wrote four well-received books including Men of War and on the Rhodesian SAS We Dared to Win, is a big-game hunter and conservationist, and survived a goring that ended with him operating on himself without anesthetic; a man who was mistaken by the doctors in Nairobi for Mel Gibson and, most important, a 14th-generation African—but white. He’s my dear friend Hannes Wessels, and the Hollywood bums should be filming his life. If they’re interested, he lives in the Cape of Africa and is known to everyone.

Theodore Acopulos

A Long Read From The Guardian



Fish and chips at the Anstruther Fish Bar in the East Neuk of Fife in Scotland
Fish and chips at the Anstruther Fish Bar. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

A funeral for fish and chips: why are Britain’s chippies disappearing?

Plenty of people will tell you the East Neuk of Fife in Scotland is the best place in the world to eat fish and chips. So what happens when its chippies – and chippies across the UK – start to close?

Thu 20 Jul 2023 04.15 EDT

O

ne summer ago, before the region’s fish and chip industry was shaken by closures, before a death that was hard for people to bear, a lorry heaped with the first fresh potatoes of the season drove along the east coast of Scotland. This lorry wound its way along the East Neuk of Fife, dodging washing lines, mooring bollards and seagulls, parking with impunity to make deliveries. There was an understanding in the East Neuk that nobody would ever get angry and honk at the inbound “tattie” lorry, fish and chips being a staple meal, vital to the region’s economy. Tourists come shocking distances to sit on old harbour walls and stab around in takeaway trays with wooden forks. The fish and chips sold in the East Neuk might be the best in the British Isles and because of that (it follows) the best on the planet. Even so, by July 2022, local friers were finding it harder and harder to balance their books.

The driver of the tattie lorry, a red-cheeked Scotsman named Richard Murray, carried keys for most of the businesses on his route, to save from waking any tired friers who’d been up late the night before, poring anxiously over their sums. War in Ukraine coupled with ongoing complications from Brexit had driven up prices of almost all the goods that fish and chip shops depended on, from live ingredients to oil and salt to packaging. More distressing was the problem of rising energy costs. This meal is prepared using a great guzzler of a range cooker that must be kept on and roiling at all hours of a trading day. As the price of gas and electricity threatened to double, then triple, through 2022, friers were opening their energy bills with gritted teeth. A trade association called the National Federation of Fish Friers said that as many as a third of the UK’s 10,500 shops might go dark, warning of a potential “extinction event”.

It was about 8am when Murray drove his tattie lorry into a village called Pittenweem. He was met on the road by Alec Wyse, a skilled frier, 59 years old and known as Eck, who ran a takeaway called the Pittenweem Fish Bar. The tiny shop had been bought by Wyse’s father using money from the sale of a family fishing boat. There were nautical portraits on the walls. A peg-letter menu listed eight unchanging menu items, one of which was described in its entirety as “FISH”. Working together, Wyse and Murray unloaded sacks of potatoes from the lorry, carrying them inside on their shoulders.

A mile along the shore from Pittenweem, in the smarter harbour town of Anstruther, Murray parked his lorry outside a fish and chip shop called the Wee Chippy. Founded by Ian Fleming, a 64-year-old seafood trader with a tattoo of a shark on his forearm, the Wee Chippy stood across from a seaweed-covered strip of beach and a cobbled jetty. Fleming later told me it ruined his marriage, this fish and chip shop. “The hours,” he growled in explanation. Daily operations had long since passed to his business partner, a chef in his 40s called Chris Lewis. But Fleming kept a close eye on the Wee Chippy, which had absorbed such a big part of his life.

Leaving Anstruther behind, the tattie round almost done, Murray swung his lorry inland, in the rough direction of Dundee and a fish and chip shop called the Popular. Bright and cramped, the Popular had an eye-catching facade that was painted brown and baize green, making it resemble a snooker table turned on one side. A family concern, the Popular was staffed six days a week by a man called Graham Forbes, his wife Angela, and their two adult children. Though Forbes was in his mid-70s, he was the one who rose early to let the tattie man in. He liked to get started at about the same time the sun came up, feeding potatoes into the Popular’s rumbling peeler.

The harbour in Anstruther Fife Scotland UK
The harbour in Anstruther. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

These three businesses – the Pittenweem Fish Bar in Pittenweem, the Wee Chippy in Anstruther, the Popular in Dundee – shared not only a potato supplier but the near-religious devotion of the communities they serviced. They were run by men and women who had thick skins, literally so when it came to their fingertips, which had become so desensitised to heat that they could be brushed against boiling oil to better position a fillet of frying fish or test the readiness of chopped potatoes as they fizzed and crisped. But these people were not invulnerable to strain. By the following summer, two of the three businesses would be gone, forced to close against their owner’s will.

I visited the East Neuk several times during that difficult year: in high tourist season, in the eerie quiet of winter, in the limbo between. As a national industry foundered, I wanted to document what it was like for a group of friers as they were brought to the brink, competing against each other even as they helped each other out, always prepping for tomorrow, cooking for today, running their numbers at night, trying not to become yet another fish and chip shop that disappeared. Between July 2022 and July 2023, things got tougher and sadder in the East Neuk than anybody predicted they would. By the time I made my last visit, people were in mourning, having said goodbye to a beloved local figure who gave their all to a cherished, suddenly endangered trade; and it was no longer so difficult to imagine a world without fish and chips.

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he origin question, wrote the historian John Walton in his definitive history of the dish, “is a matter of murky and probably insoluble dispute”. Should Londoners take the most credit for its creation and proliferation, or Lancastrians? The textile towns around Manchester or the fishing ports of Scotland? Undoubtedly, fish and chips is immigrant food, imported, perfected and perpetuated by a mish-mash of refugees and others originating from Portugal, Spain, eastern Europe, Italy, Cyprus, Greece and China. The method of deep-frying white fish in a liquid batter made of flour and egg or milk was likely brought over to London by Jews in flight from Catholic inquisitors. Walton and other food historians have identified chipped potatoes “in the French style” being sold from carts in the industrial Pennines as early as the 1860s.
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Whether styled as chippy, chippie, chippery, chipper, fishery, fish bar or fish restaurant, whether given cheerful punning titles (the Haddock Paddock, the Plaice to Be) or rootsier names that acknowledged their founders (Jimmy’s, George’s, Low’s, Long’s), these shops proliferated through the 20th century, carpeting the land from the northernmost – Frankie’s, up in Shetland – all the way to the Smugglers, down on the tapering tip of Cornwall. The fundamental cooking method is always the same. Fillets of white fish, usually haddock or cod, are slapped about in a viscous yellow batter before being dropped into 180C baths of oil. An experienced frier will tend their bubbling fillets compulsively, using a metal strainer to turn and tease the food as the batter flares and hardens, basting with twitches of the wrist. After about five minutes, the battered fish will be golden, curved in on itself like a banana, firm enough to be set atop chips without surrendering its shape.

As for the chips, these are made from white potatoes, peeled and cut to the thickness of thumbs, then placed in a steel basket and submerged in the same hot oil until they will crack apart when squeezed. There is resistance in Scotland towards the frying of cod, which is seen as an English lunacy, but it is generally accepted that potatoes grown in the drier soil of England do better when fried, being lower in glucose and less likely to caramelise. National pride stretches so far. Only not so far as brown chips.

Chips from Murray Camerons chip van in Fife Scotland
Chips from Murray Cameron’s chip van. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Ideally, just after eating a portion of fish and chips, you should be aware that what you’ve put inside your body was prepared using ungodly quantities of grease, yet you don’t yourself feel greasy. This paradoxical richness without grossness, an angelic lightness of touch in preparing one of the heaviest meals on Earth, sets the better shops apart. At the Golden Galleon in Aldeburgh, takeaways are lined up in paper pouches on the counter, the fish tumbled in with the chips, all to be eaten with a rooting fork. At the Ashvale in Aberdeen, the hungriest diners can order a “whale” portion, so huge that anyone who finishes it unassisted wins a prize. Along a particular stretch of pavement in Holborn in London, pedestrians walk headlong into a bubble of airborne fat that seems to enclose a shop called the Fryer’s Delight. They fry in beef dripping at the Delight, not vegetable oil, creating a flavour that is fattier, more unctuous.

At the Popular in Dundee, Graham Forbes and his family cooked using beef dripping as well. Sit-in diners at the Popular huddled into wooden booths, sometimes packing so close, Forbes told me, that if those at table #1 were talking politics, those at tables #2 and #3 were inevitably talking politics as well. He tended not to think of the Popular as a business. It was a little world. And like any world, it had its points of pride, its stubborn habits.

One day I spoke to a man up the supply chain who oversaw the weekly tattie runs through the East Neuk. His name is Conor Booth. He works for a Scottish company called John Callum Potatoes. Booth explained that the top fish and chip shops are kept consistent by generations of rolling tradition. But many of those traditions (the dawn calls to prep ingredients, the midnight equipment-scrubbing, the reliance on inefficient cookers) have made willing staff scarcer and costs harder to bring down. “Every industry has to adapt to survive,” said Booth. “Unfortunately, in fish and chips, there’s only so much you can do while keeping it traditional. The potatoes need their peeling. The fish needs its frying.”

Last year, as trading conditions worsened, proprietors were giving interviews to local newspapers, explaining the pressures they were under. These communications tended to have the tone of panicky messages scribbled by hostages. At the Crispy Cod in Worcester, they said: “It feels like we have no control.” The Gipsy Lane Chippery in Leicester: “It’s scary.” Paddy’s Plaice in Criccieth: “Need help.” In the town of Macduff in Scotland, a shop called the Happy Haddock received a bill that put up its energy costs from £600 a month to £2,000. The Happy Haddock closed. Roughly the same thing happened at the Fryar Tuck in Belfast, then at Barnacle Bill’s in Somerset, and Chip Ahoy on the Isle of Wight. At Chung’s Chinese Chippy in Lancashire, a note to customers appeared in the window, similar in substance to the messages put on display at Stefano’s in Glasgow and chalked on a blackboard outside Jones Plaice in Caldicot: “Due to excessive price increases in all areas, raw materials, labour, fuel and utilities, we have decided to close.”

At the Popular in Dundee, the Forbes family issued a plea to customers via Facebook: “Use us or lose us.” Graham Forbes’s son Lindsay had already given an interview to a Dundee newspaper that amounted to a forewarning of closure. A clipping of this article (“CHIPPERS ARE BATTERED BY SOARING COSTS”) was pinned to the Popular’s fridge on the summer day the family huddled to make a decision. “This is the end,” Graham said, “isn’t it?” They telephoned the Dundee newspaper again, which published a story confirming the Popular would close after 35 years. Graham’s daughter Gaynor put an announcement online. The next day, “as soon as we opened the doors at 11.30am,” Graham said, “we were mobbed. Generations of customers. Grandparents. Grandkids. People asked, why? I told them the enjoyment had gone out of it, from worrying all the time. I told them, if you’d kept coming, even just once a fortnight, it might have been different.”

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efore the main danger to fish and chip shops was the quarterly energy bill, it was sudden fire. Ignored for a moment, the hot cooking fat can get too hot, rising to an auto-ignition point and exploding. In a single year – 2018 – there were serious fires at Old Salty’s in Glasgow, the Admiral in Overseal, Mr Chips in Fakenham, the Pilton Fryer in Pilton, the Fish Bar in Fenham, Crossroads in Kingstanding, Graylings in Fremington, the River Lane Fish Bar in Norfolk, the Portway Fish Bar in Rowley Regis, Bruno’s on Canvey Island, Jimmy’s Palace in Liverpool, Scoffs in Paignton and Moby Dick in Shirley. “Doesn’t matter how experienced you are,” said Chris Lewis, one of the owners of the Wee Chippy in Anstruther, “if something mechanical goes, or something catches, and you haven’t seen it – that’s it, that’s your time.”

The Wee Chippy’s time came on Remembrance Sunday in 2018, in the middle of a lunch service. A frier was distracted; the oil in the range ignited; a huge ball of fire was sucked into the Wee Chippy’s ventilator, leaving just enough time for staff and customers to flee before the ground floor was thick with smoke. In the subsequent blaze, unpeeled potatoes from the tattie lorry blistered and shrunk in their sacks. About 100 North Sea haddocks cooked inside a fridge. Jars of pickled eggs boiled and burst. Lewis and Ian Fleming, who both live nearby, came running. They watched from across the harbour road as the glass in the windows of their shop began to melt and pulsate. Jets of orange flame licked out the chimney pots.

The Wee Chippy Anstruther in 2023 after it reopened following a fire in 2018
The Wee Chippy, Anstruther, in 2023, after it reopened following a fire in 2018. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Fleming (he of the shark tattoo) had opened this fish and chip shop in 1999, in perverse defiance of the fact that there was already a popular alternative, the Anstruther Fish Bar, just a short way along the harbour road. After the 2018 fire, Fleming’s insurance claim was rejected. “We were classed as having a flammable material behind the plasterboard,” he told me. He talked it over with Lewis and they decided to spend their own money on a refurbishment, if only to give the insurance company as well as their rivals in Anstruther “a kick in the nuts”, as Fleming put it. Between them they spent nine months and a six-figure sum getting the Wee Chippy back open in summer 2019.

Now, in summer 2022, conditions were tougher than Fleming had ever known them. As consumers battled rising costs of living at home, they were eating out less. Because they were eating out less, proprietors were being forced to charge more, right when they could least afford to discourage custom. There is a fish bar in Cardiff, John’s, that shut in 2001 and has never been bought or altered since. A decaying menu at John’s still advertises a takeaway portion of fish and chips for the unthinkable price of £2.45. Two decades later, the same meal cost £9.40 at the Wee Chippy. Few proprietors dared breach the holy barrier of £10. In fact, the owners of a shop called Café Fish in Belfast had done some honest maths and concluded that, given prevailing costs, fish and chips ought to be selling for about £15 per portion. “Who would pay it?” Fleming wondered.

If motivation ever flagged at the Wee Chippy, Fleming and Lewis only had to think of their nearest rivals up the road. For decades the Wee Chippy had been engaged in a losing battle with the Anstruther Fish Bar, which had achieved outsized fame since it opened in the 1980s, doing much to establish the East Neuk as an area of excellence for fish and chips. Prince William was a customer there during his student days. His stepmother Camilla later stopped a royal motorcade on the harbour road and sent in a security guard for takeaways. The Anstruther Fish Bar had won every industry award going. It was celebrated in guidebooks and travel pieces. Sometimes, Fleming and Lewis watched through the windows of their shop as tourists parked on the terrace outside, wandering along the harbour to eat at the Anstruther Fish Bar, later compounding the insult by putting their scraped-clean takeaway trays in the Wee Chippy’s bins.

Murrays Chippy a fish and chip van owned by Murray Cameron
Murray’s Chippy, a fish and chip van owned by Murray Cameron. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Over time there had been squabbles between the two neighbouring businesses over property, parking, staffing, branding, packaging, naming rights, as well as dibs on who could sell which variety of savoury pudding. Such rivalries were quite common, I learned. One day I got talking to an East Neuk man called Murray Cameron, a former fisherman who now ran a mobile fish-and-chips service out of a modified Vauxhall Movano van. Cameron had his own beef with the Anstruther Fish Bar. And with the Wee Chippy. Cameron said he had spent years perfecting the precise blend of flour and grains he put in his batter mix; and because of this he tended to hide his empty packaging in the bottom of his bins, fearful of his secret getting out. In every corner of the country there are friers who fret about their nearest rivals, hourly remaking the same dish until they are tweaking it minutely, improving the batter-cling, the chip-give, vying to be thought of as number one.

By now I’d spent enough time in the East Neuk to notice that whenever friers complained about each other, there was one family – the Wyses of Pittenweem – they exempted from criticism. Eck Wyse and his relatives had run the Pittenweem Fish Bar since the 1980s, taking it over from the Baird family, before them the Smalls. This was a seriously adored village hub, one of the few places in Pittenweem that remained open after dark. The Wyses’ ancient cooker, wide as the room that contained it and submarine-like in appearance, turned out takeaways that were passed to customers the old fashioned way, wrapped in paper. Though the Pittenweem Fish Bar wasn’t often included in tourist books or internet must-try lists, people in the region knew how rare and special it was, an inexpensive gem that seemed to stand outside of time.

When the Pittenweem Fish Bar burned down at the end of summer 2022, it was a trauma felt for miles.

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he fire started on a Tuesday afternoon, hours after the tattie lorry passed through on a run. Flames massed in the cramped interior of the shop, burning up the net curtains, popping out windows, sending a shaft of dark smoke over Pittenweem’s church and towards the sea. A passing neighbour rushed in to drag out Wyse, who had been cooking at the range and, according to a later account by an eyewitness, was dazed by smoke. Fire engines were on the scene for hours. By morning the shop was unrecognisable, its painted sign gone, the front walls blistered and cracked.

When he drove through Pittenweem again in October 2022, Richard Murray slowed down his tattie lorry to pass the ruined shop. He turned off his music. “Devastating,” he muttered. Arriving in Anstruther soon afterwards, Murray parked near the seaweed-covered beach as usual. He fell into conversation with Ian Fleming, who was waiting in the chill outside the Wee Chippy, peering along the harbour road. “Town’s quieting down,” Fleming observed. Murray nodded.

As they started to unload sacks of potatoes, the two men chatted about the terrible frequency of fires in their industry. In former times, Fleming said, you could try to rebuild after a fire, just about trusting that the fish-and-chip economy would support you. Even after the Wee Chippy was denied its insurance payout back in 2018, the market seemed stable enough to make the risk of reinvestment worthwhile. Now, in 2022, when uncertainty prevailed, would it even be possible to bring a burned fish and chip shop back?

“That’s where you worry about Eck,” Murray said to Fleming.

“Aye,” growled Fleming.

“Seen him?”

Fleming shook his head. “I texted.”

A lot of people in the East Neuk had been sharing memories of the Pittenweem shop, using Facebook forums to gather anecdotes and photographs. Former employees at the fish bar spoke of after-school jobs peeling or cleaning. Customers memorialised favourite orders. That autumn, when I visited an East Neuk seafood business run by a family called the Wilsons, the two married owners reminisced about a courtship spent eating unimprovable Pittenweem takeaways. People stood in queues so long, Wendy Wilson remembered, the line would snake away from the Wyses’ door, beyond the local bank, wrapping around the village church. Since the fire, the village had lost something irreplaceable: a queue to join, a set of flavours and smells, an illuminated place to go after dark, a takeaway to eat on a sea wall.

Fish and chip diners in Anstruther
Fish and chip diners in Anstruther. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

It is an article of faith that fish and chips tastes better – best – when eaten by the sea. I’ve agreed with this sentiment all my life, without wondering why it might be so, except to think that being near a shoreline must equate to freshness of fish. It did used to be the case that many East Neuk villages could support their own seafood markets. When the Pittenweem Fish Bar first opened in the 1980s, haddocks were bought off the boats in Pittenweem harbour. Today, an auction house in Peterhead on the north-east tip of Scotland is all that’s left on one whole side of the country. Almost every haddock that is fried in the East Neuk has been trucked 100 miles south from Peterhead first.

Why, then, should fish and chips by the sea taste special? In a place like this, I think it must be the continued intimacy between fish as a trade and fish as a meal. As well as part-owning the Wee Chippy, Ian Fleming is a seafood trader. He is the son of a seafood trader. Before he became a frier, Eck Wyse was a fisherman, the son of a fisherman. Down on Pittenweem harbour, two bronze statues – a mother and a daughter – face the choppy water, memorialising all the local people who have tried to make a living from the sea, as well as the 400 or so who have died trying since the 1800s. Decades ago, Fleming’s father-in-law drowned in a fishing accident. Many, many people in the East Neuk have lost a friend, an uncle, a cousin. Fishing is a serious matter here. Fish and chips is a serious meal.

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t was December 2022. The Pittenweem Fish Bar had burned down. The Popular in Dundee was closed. The Wee Chippy clung on, though tourists would not visit the East Neuk in any sort of number again until the spring. After about 5pm, the whole coast could seem abandoned, just the tide audible in the dark as well as the grumble of salt lorries as they gritted the roads in case of a freeze. When I visited Fleming at his house on the outskirts of Anstruther, he opened his ledger to see how many haddocks they were getting through at the Wee Chippy in the offseason. Not so many haddocks, he frowned, putting aside the book. “We’re telling ourselves that business is down because of the frozen roads. That might be denial.”

In Dundee, the Forbes family had stripped and emptied the Popular, selling off a fridge, a chest freezer, a bain marie, two menu boards, as well as their till and the small paper rolls that were meant for future receipts. Tables #1, #2 and #3 were uprooted and taken away for use in a restaurant in Inverness. Lindsay Forbes accepted a job with a wholesaler. Graham and Angela Forbes retired. The next time Graham walked by the Popular, around Christmas, there was a “To Let” sign in the window. He could still see his own tacked-up notice to customers, explaining the closure. “No other option,” Graham had written.

In Pittenweem, charred wood and plaster were heaped on the pavement outside the ruined fish bar. Cones and metal fencing stopped passersby getting too close. The scene appeared frozen in time since the fire, even though months had passed, even though the Wyse family had written a message to customers saying they hoped to “rise from the ashes” if they could. Murray Cameron, the mobile frier who travelled around the villages of the East Neuk in his van, had never once encroached on Wyse’s territory in Pittenweem. It was his tribute to Wyse, his show of confidence that one day Wyse would bring this business back.

Behind the scenes, as a member of the Wyse family later told a local newspaper, Eck was taking the closure badly. “Like losing a limb,” said his wife, Anna. As more and more weeks went by without the fire damage being cleared, Fleming began to doubt the prospects of a revival. He had experienced a blaze at first hand. He remembered how crushing it was, waiting weeks and months to get answers from an insurance company – all for nothing in the end, because the Wee Chippy’s claim was refused. As 2022 turned to 2023, and another month passed without the wreckage outside the Pittenweem Fish Bar being cleared, Fleming worried more and more about his friend.

Elsewhere around the country, a fish and chip shop called the Little Fryer in Southampton had to close. Unsustainable costs. The Dolphin in Belfast closed, as did the Seafarer in Northwich and the High Plaice in Alston. The owners of Simpsons in Quedgeley felt they were busy, thriving even. But their energy bill had quadrupled, so it closed. Staff at the Whieldon Fish Bar in Stoke-on-Trent told their local newspaper they were clinging on by leaving the lights off whenever they could. Simeone’s in Glasgow was listed for sale, along with about 700 other fish and chip shops including the Ocean King in Gosport, the Haddock Paddock in Cumbria and Ightenhill Traditional in Burnley. Smarts in Abingdon closed.

At the end of January 2023, Fleming received a text message from a friend. He was told that Eck had died that day. It was sudden. The police were not treating the death as suspicious. The family put out a photograph, online, that showed Eck behind the range at his old fish and chip shop. “Where he was happiest,” they wrote, “where he belonged.”

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here are fancier meals than fish and chips. There are bigger-ticket meals, those we put on bucket lists or pencil in for birthdays. We look to fish and chips for something different, which I think of as constancy, a firm handrail to our pasts. As a schoolboy I often bought lunch from Andrews in Enfield, where they would douse a takeaway with the leftover brine from pickled gherkins. Later I went to university in Yorkshire. The taste of sweet curry sauce over chips will forever turn me 18. My parents’ parents were from different backgrounds. Every spring, at Passover, my maternal family would gather to eat fried fish from a London takeaway. Every autumn, we would drive 500 miles north to visit my paternal family in Aberdeen. My Jewish grandma and my Protestant gran were very different people. Both put absolute trust in fried fish as a food that would unite and enthuse a bunch of disparate relatives.

The same as hearing a Beatles tune, or rewatching The Snowman at Christmas, or raising up a pint of foaming beer, fish and chips is a national pleasure we expect to repeat and repeat. Impossible to imagine eating this meal for the last time. When a shop called Kong’s in Greater Manchester announced it would close, following so many others, people massed outside as if for a wake. There was a one-hour wait to get inside, then a two-hour wait. In the queue they joked about buying extra portions, to freeze them and sell them on to anybody suffering Kong’s withdrawals. We don’t expect these takeaways to be taken away. We imagine dining-in in perpetuity.

Fish in the fryer at the Anstruther Fish Bar
Fish being fried at the Anstruther Fish Bar. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

In spring 2023, the Lowford Fish Bar in Bursledon closed, its owners describing the decision as the hardest of their lives. At around the same time, Jack Spratt’s Superior in Oldham closed after 25 years of continuous trading. Skircoat Green Fish Bar in Halifax closed after 40 years. Jackson’s Chippie in Ilkeston closed after 62 years. The owner of Sam’s Fish Bar in Fenton said he was moonlighting as a delivery driver to stay afloat. Pawsons Golden Plaice in Chorley closed.

Earlier this month, I was back on a tattie run through the East Neuk. The weekly delivery was no longer being driven by Richard Murray. It was no longer weekly. With fewer businesses to sell to, potato orders in the region were often so reduced that Murray’s boss, Conor Booth, could handle a delivery using his pickup truck. Booth met me in the truck and we thundered along the coast road. It was raining, “a real dreich”, Booth said. As we went, he talked about potato prices, twice what they were a year ago and causing yet another threat to businesses. There had been a weak seasonal yield. It was unfortunate timing. In fish and chips, Booth said, “if there wasn’t bad luck, there wouldn’t be any luck”.

Booth had a one-month-old baby waiting for him at home and he was eager to finish the delivery run and get back. Parenthood had brought up a confusion of memories, he said, as well as premonitions about the future. He had been remembering driving around with his granddad when he was small, hearing about vanished local businesses, some of which were impossible for him to picture. That used to be a boot-maker, his granddad would say, pointing. That used to be a knife-sharpener. Booth wondered if he would drive a grandchild of his own along this coast; if he would have to explain, there used to be these places we called fish bars.

It stopped raining. Booth delivered some final potatoes, then let me out of the truck at Pittenweem cemetery. As the sky brightened overhead, the damp reddish gravel of the cemetery paths started to dry, getting its crunch back. The night before Wyse’s funeral in February, there had been a great spectacle in these skies – an aurora that flared purple and green. The following morning there was another extraordinary sight in Pittenweem. The village was full of people, not only Wyse’s family and friends but his customers, hundreds of whom had turned out to say goodbye. There were so many mourners that the church did not have enough pews. They ran out of standing room. Mourners left outside started to line the route to the cemetery and later joined the funeral procession as it passed. Wyse was buried next to his father, who had run the family shop before him.

After paying my respects, I walked along the coast to Anstruther. It was teatime. The harbour was busy with boats. Riggings clacked and hissed in the breeze. A dad on a bench fed his toddler, one scrap of batter at a time. A middle-aged couple sat in their car. They had a tray propped between them, two teas in china cups, cutlery from home, and steaming takeaway boxes on their laps. At about 6pm, I met Ian Fleming outside the Wee Chippy. They had a good number of customers in the dining room. The shop was enjoying a bit of a summer-season revival, Fleming said. They had recently won a Scottish catering award, beating their rivals up the road for once. The Wee Chippy would abide through another summer at least. We waited and got a table. The waitress asked, do you want fish and chips?

 This article was amended on 20 July 2023 to replace a map which misspelt Kirkcaldy.

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