The barrister, novelist and essayist Helen Dale is not a lady to mince her words. She talks about the Jason Arday fiasco at Cambridge University: “The idea that historically disadvantaged groups are entitled to extra civil rights – coupled with social preferment – over and above … | Continue reading
In fact, RICU has actively become biased against entirely mainstream right-wing beliefs. According to the 2023 Shawcross Review into Prevent, while its ‘products related to Islamic terrorism focus on the most serious material relating to violent Islamist ideology…much of the mate … | Continue reading
Peggy Noonan is not a columnist I agree with on everything but she seems at times to have a knack of getting to the nub of a trend, a cultural shift, or however else one wants to call it. She has this WSJ ($) article out about the socialists now pushing – successfully it seems – … | Continue reading
“We are Jason Arday,” say the Cambridge faculty. “We are Jason Arday,” say the British academic establishment. “We are Jason Arday,” say humanities faculty throughout the West. And you know what? They are all correct. – Dinesh D’Souza | Continue reading
When I was a teacher, many years ago, the Times Higher Education Supplement was on every staffroom table and was considered the voice of the progressive establishment. Perhaps I should not be surprised to see its modern incarnation, Times Higher Education, receive the sort of tre … | Continue reading
As a writer and broadcaster in 2020s Britain, one almost expects the police eventually to arrive and allege some sort of thought crime, particularly if one writes about anti-Jewish racism and violence, free speech, the Middle East, Islam or trans issues. I write about all of them … | Continue reading
Long-time Samizdata readers will know that one of my hobbies is to read The Times (of London) from a hundred years ago. It is often the case that the most interesting articles are also the shortest. Take this one for example: The brevity of the article may have something to do w … | Continue reading
I have visited this topic about forest/open heathland fires, the positive externalities of private property ownership, Tragedy of the Commons and the unintended consequences of Green not-so-benign neglect before (remember those bad fires in Australia?) before, but here’s a remind … | Continue reading
“The modern socialist imagination is a magical kingdom where doctors, nurses, professors, builders, electricians, and day care workers all report for duty because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a compelling Instagram video.” From a Substack author called “Ivana”. The whole item is … | Continue reading
Justin Bronk has published a very interesting update on RUSI: Four Years On: An Update on the Air War Over Ukraine | Continue reading
“Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor”, writes the Guardian’s Lanre Bakare. Bakare has made strenuous efforts to be fair to Arday, but, alongside the extensive evidence of plagiarism and the extreme physical unlikelihood of Ard … | Continue reading
Some people say the government has abandoned us. I know what they mean – our governments have abandoned their primary function of defending us and our borders. But in every other area, they are suffocating rather deserting us! – Alice Smith | Continue reading
This one’s fairly simple. Some communities are more cohesive than others. You’d be surprised how much a prosperous suburb with engaged residents has in common with an inner-city estate with a dominant (often minority ethnic) community. Sure, there are points of tension, but local … | Continue reading
Seventy-five men fly into Britain each spring with a handpiece in a canvas bag, and between them they take the wool off something between one and a half and two million sheep. They arrive after the first of April. They are gone by September, most of them long before. They claim n … | Continue reading
“We now know U.S. scientists collaborated with their Chinese counterparts on controversial gain-of-function experiments and that grants from NIAID flowed to the Wuhan lab through various channels. It’s highly likely that U.S. researchers provided the skills and our government off … | Continue reading
This is not good enough, says Ofcom. It wants, it seems, pre-emptive powers to block access to sites operating anywhere in the world, should they be deemed harmful to people in the UK. This is authoritarian nonsense on any number of levels. For one thing, it moves noticeably towa … | Continue reading
Power, which used to be the responsibility of Cabinet, has now been diffused away to quangos, devolved governments, NGOs, and judges. Like La Serenissima before us, it seems impossible for the government of the day to do anything meaningful about the structural problems facing us … | Continue reading
“Most people still think SpaceX is `just’ a rocket company. But it’s actually a machine for producing world-class talent. A talented engineer takes a job at SpaceX, learns the Elon Musk `way’ of solving impossible problems, then graduates as a force of nature ready to transform o … | Continue reading
Xerox PARC invented the graphical interface, the mouse, and networked computing, and gave the ideas away almost by accident to visitors from Apple and Microsoft who knew what to do with them. Blockbuster was offered the chance to buy Netflix for fifty million dollars and turned i … | Continue reading
You’d need a heart of stone not to Laffer – Sunday Sport in response to A Serious Newspaper… Scottish tax hike for high earners backfires with loss of £22m | Continue reading
In the Telegraph today: The messages that show Covid scientists secretly suspected a lab leak Scientists who were instrumental in shutting down the Covid lab-leak theory admitted in private “we can’t rule it out”, newly released messages show. In March 2020, a group of influenti … | Continue reading
A chap called John Russo, whose comments I follow on LinkedIn, takes aim at the recent pattern of well-off people joining “Patriotic Millionaire” calls for folk like them to be taxed a lot more. An obvious retort is that all they need to do is set up a direct debit with the relev … | Continue reading
So let us name the principle actually in operation, because it is not sub judice. Sub judice is a rule, and rules apply evenly or they are not rules. The principle in operation is that speculation is dangerous when it is inconvenient and wholesome when it is useful. Ann’s case, w … | Continue reading
These cases might initially read as isolated absurdities: a pensioner’s raided home, a fine for a nickname, a meme investigated as though it were genuine Nazi propaganda. Taken together, they describe a pattern in which laws designed to protect democracy from its enemies are bein … | Continue reading
Clive Crook, a columnist in Bloomberg, does not mince his words about the new UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, who appears to be of the view that the pro-market reforms of Mrs Thatcher and some of her successors (not nearly pro-market enough, in my view), were all a terrible mist … | Continue reading
All things grow, bacteria, blue whales, businesses and bureaucracies. The difference for the latter is, that the first three must wrench a living from a cold, uncaring world, whereas the latter merely needs to increase taxes. The bureaucracy grows like a cancer, stealing resource … | Continue reading
Christopher Nolan’s flick The Odyssey is probably a work of marketing genius, or maybe not, we will see. Many are now saying ‘based’ culture warriors and those repelled by certain very outré casting choices have got it wrong and it is actually good. However, you will never convi … | Continue reading
There is a Crowdfunder live at the moment which tells you everything you need to know about the government of this country. The Centre for Migration Control asked the Ministry of Justice a simple question. How many migrants have been convicted of murder, rape and the supply of we … | Continue reading
“Burnham to scrap Starmer’s digital ID scheme in ‘reset of priorities’”, the Guardian reports. Andy Burnham is expected to scrap Keir Starmer’s plans for digital ID cards in a “reset of priorities” when he enters Downing Street on Monday. The new Labour leader plans to redirect t … | Continue reading
“Andy Burnham’s line about reversing ‘40 years of neo-liberalism’ – i.e. since the Thatcher government’s reforms – is beginning to grate somewhat. ‘Britain took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s,’ he told us, while accepting the Labour leadership. We ‘surrendered control’ of w … | Continue reading
Speaking ill of the dead is not an offence, however offensive. If Heather Herbert joins the @SpeechUnion, we will do our best to help. https://t.co/5WAT2JdeZS — The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) July 16, 2026 “Speaking ill of the dead is not an offence, however offensive. If … | Continue reading
“The year 2026 brings four semiquincentennials that matter greatly to me, that I think are related to each other: the American Declaration of Independence; the publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; the publication of Edward Gi … | Continue reading
The inimitable Preston Byrne has compared two think tank proposals for restoring free speech within the United Kingdom in A Tale of Two Bills: Comparing the Adam Smith Institute’s and the Prosperity Institute’s Free Speech Proposals. This kind of thing is an essential part of set … | Continue reading
Combined with the already-passed Online Safety Act and the previously announced intention to ban under-16s entirely from social media — a ban that Prime Minister-in-waiting Burnham intends to support — these laws, enacted or proposed, look to anyone except a Labour lickspittle to … | Continue reading
I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that the families of the victims of horrific crime always express the same concern, word for word, every time. I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with the “specially-trained” officers who support them. – Konstantin Kisin | Continue reading
She was funny in a register entirely her own. On day one in the Strasbourg parliament I stepped out of an office into one of those interminable corridors to see her at a distance, walking in lockstep with Claire Fox, the two of them deep in conversation. Two women of ferocious co … | Continue reading
This is a fine article by Nina Roberts, but it might have been nice if Guardian readers and their US equivalents had thought about the disproportionate burden of “equality” laws on small businesses (as opposed to large businesses who have whole floors full of hotshot lawyers) for … | Continue reading
When you’ve lost the Guardian… How to Get Filthy Rich With Gary Stevenson review – how did this end up such an embarrassment? This evangelising of a wealth tax should have made for a truly amazing documentary. But it allows its host to be totally out-argued by all his interviewee … | Continue reading
I was saddened but not particularly surprised to hear that Ann Widdecombe had died yesterday at the age of 78. There seemed to be somewhat less than the usual amount of vile gloating on Twitter*, and many comments like this one from Colin Freeman: Doorstepped Anne Widdecombe late … | Continue reading
Markets are discovery mechanisms. In war adaptation and discovery are a matter of survival. Ukraine began the war with a traditional military procurement system. Large, standardised orders from suppliers chosen by the defence ministry with no room for adjustment to individual cir … | Continue reading
“Invest in Britain or I’ll force you to, minister tells pension funds”, the Guardian reports: The business secretary, Peter Kyle, has told UK pension funds to “get off their high horses” and invest in Britain or be forced to do so by law. Expressing frustration at the level of in … | Continue reading
The mountain… According to the polling company Ipsos, 2 in 3 British adults (69%) would support a law that requires social media companies to use age-verification tools to ban children under the age of 16 from accessing their platforms in the UK, and 3 in 5 (61%) support social … | Continue reading
Every party in trouble prays for the same miracle, which is amnesia. The Conservative Party’s entire strategy for the next four years rests on the hope that the British people will misremember the last fourteen. Kemi Badenoch has said as much, remarking that it is unhelpful to ch … | Continue reading
Lots of news today. Nigel Farage has stood down as MP for Clacton, stating he will seek to be re-elected in the resulting by-election. The Daily Mail has defeated Prince Harry and several other claimants in the High Court, a result that Lord Dacre, the Mail’s publisher, has haile … | Continue reading
Gawain Towler explains the ongoing campaign by the British establishment to destroy the existential threat The Reform Party poses to them. The first aim, the one they would toast if they achieved it, is to take Farage down altogether, to force a resignation. They will not be so … | Continue reading
“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad o … | Continue reading
Establishment clearly running an operation to get Farage. If they do force him out – clearly the game plan- over technicalities about what he did / didn’t declare, I think they’ll start a firestorm. The public will see this as the attempted stitch up that it is. Clacton folk (I k … | Continue reading
The government consultation document “Making public services work for you with your digital identity” gives its chapters aspirational names like “Useful”, “Inclusive”, and “Trusted”. Here’s the description for “Trusted”: Part 5: Trusted includes information on how we will design … | Continue reading