This is not a change of heart. A change of heart is permitted to an honest man, and he announces it, and he takes the consequences. This is something else. It is a man who held one view in the pub in Ashton and holds the opposite in the Berlaymont, and who will not say rejoin and will not say no, because either word would cost him somebody.
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November 4th, 2026 | 30 comments
 This is today’s cartoon by Ben Jennings in the Guardian:
If you can’t see the cartoon, it shows a man and a woman in what looks like a TV studio set up for a Sunday morning political interview. The man, a toffee-nosed member of the upper classes, is saying, “Britain has already paid reparations for slavery to all those poor slave-owning families who lost out when it was abolished…”. The woman – presumably the interviewer – looks nonplussed. The cartoon is clearly meant to suggest that the British government of the 1830s paying the slaveowners the then vast sum of twenty million pounds to free their slaves after the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act was a bad thing. It was indeed regrettable that those who had done evil were rewarded rather than punished. But paying off the masters worked. After half a century of effort, and with a thousand caveats and complications, it freed the slaves. I ask Mr Jennings, as I ask everyone who sneers at the fact that the British government paid off the slaveowners, what strategy they think the government should have followed to free the slaves instead? Just telling the owners to get on and do it because Parliament said so ran the risk that, without any incentive to obey a law that would impoverish them, they would simply refuse. Then what – war? The slaves were held in the West Indies, not in Britain itself. Sending multiple fleets across thousands of miles to subdue each rebellious island and territory would have been beyond the capacities of any government in the world at that time. Civil wars, as this would have been, are particularly terrible. The war the United States fought to end slavery in that country killed a higher proportion of the people involved than almost any other war in history. Another thing: the outcome of war can never be certain. The slaveowners in some or all of the islands might very well have fought off the overstretched government forces, establishing independent slaveowning states in which slavery might have lasted for generations more than it did in real life. All in all, if you were a slave circa 1833 and you somehow heard about this proposal to bring freedom to you and your family at the cost of unjustly rewarding your oppressor, would you want it to go ahead? November 3rd, 2026 | 33 comments
Oxfam started out as famine relief – a good, Godly, righteous thing to be doing. Get food to the starving – bonzer. Then two things happen. One, we find out that shipping food to the starving – except in the most obvious cases of outright famine – isn’t really the way to do it. Because that bankrupts all the farmers for the next year, we make the problem permanent. Instead, we should ship money to poor people so they can buy food. This requires fewer bureaucrats in aid agencies. November 2nd, 2026 | 16 comments
November 1st, 2026 | 19 comments
I have been wading through various sources to try and make sense of the political confrontation in Poland. Any actual experts on Poland’s political scene care to weigh in? If so, keep it focused please, rather than hitting us with diatribes rather than analysis. October 31st, 2026 | 29 comments
Before 7 October 2023, the English-language Wikipedia article on Zionism opened by describing a movement that emerged to “espouse support for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.” Since then, the opening has been reworded to say that this homeland was to be established “through colonization,” immediately followed by a new sweeping claim: “Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.” The sentence is backed by an unusually large bundle of 17 citations, drawn from historians including Benny Morris, Rashid Khalidi, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappé, and to the casual reader it looks like the settled verdict of scholarship. It is not. The editor who introduced it in August 2024 has since been banned from the entire Palestine-Israel topic area for non-neutral editing. Yet the sentence survives, and for a year Wikipedia formally barred its editors from even discussing whether to remove it. October 30th, 2026 | 16 comments
For their part, Russian commentators and politicians today seem to have an absurdly exaggerated idea of Britain’s power, the puppet-masters behind American global domination, still pulling the strings, rather than a country run by naive humanities graduates who place our ‘international standing’ above national interests. Rabid threats to nuke London by tipsy Russian politicians are the last crumbs of dignity and self-respect we have left, for which thank you. – Ed West October 29th, 2026 | 14 comments
The ASI published a paper that recommended the wholesale privatization of local government services, starting with bin collection. Thatcher liked it so much that she had it photocopied 10,000 times and sent a copy to every Conservative councillor in Britain. Thatcher didn’t like the word ‘privatization’, because it sounded new and strange. She wanted to call it denationalisation. But we pointed out that we were going to apply it to industries that had never been nationalised in the first place. We still insisted on spelling it with a ‘z’ to make it look like something new. The first to go was Cable and Wireless, then BP, but the first big public flotation was of the Post Office telephone service, a state monopoly. Rather than sell it to a private company, the government decided to sell it to everyone, with a flotation in which the public were invited to apply for shares. To keep the telephone workers on side, they were offered 200 free shares if they bought 200. The union ran a hostile campaign showing a telephone cable being cut with scissors, but 96% of the workforce took the money instead. – Madsen Pirie, recalling how Margaret Thatcher turned things around. October 28th, 2026 | 15 comments
The subject of public disorder seems strangely topical, as I’m writing as rioting in France quietens down. Events in Paris and elsewhere have, inevitably, prompted a number of “what if?” comparisons with the UK. Our tradition of protest is significantly different from that of continental Europe, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to be complacent. On the other hand, nor is it necessarily a reason for panicky chief constables and sly mandarins to litigate for mega-forces, national police services and gendarmeries. – Dominic Adler, discussing Blighty’s recent history of crowds kicking off. Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here. October 27th, 2026 | 7 comments
One is we’ve just let state spending drift up too high. It’s 10 percentage points higher as a share of GDP than it was in the early Blair era. That in itself is enough to take 1% off growth, probably. Second, the markets are all gummed up. All our markets of all kinds are simply gummed up, over-regulated massively compared to where we were 20 or 30 years ago. The third bit of it, I think, is less economic and more cultural. I think it’s about the erosion of the sense of the British nation state’s political project – that we are all one country together, all pulling in the same sort of direction. October 26th, 2026 | 15 comments
In the course of a fairly long working life I have seen the newspaper as an institution grow from small things to very great things. It has grown with the growth of popular government in the country. I don’t think that is a mere coincidence. The one can hardly exist without the other. A free Press is essential to the working of the modern democratic State. A democracy uninformed is a blind giant, who may destroy the very things which he ought most to value, and who may end by destroying himself. The first act of a tyranny is to suppress or shackle the Press. Let us never forget that the liberty of unlicensed printing is the foundation of all our liberties. – C. P. Scott on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 1926. Scott was celebrating 55 years of editing the then Manchester Guardian. One can only wonder what he would think of Ofcom etc let alone the modern-day Guardian’s support for it. October 24th, 2026 | 19 comments
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