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“In the current Russian leadership’s rather 19th — though increasingly 21st — century view of how the world works, lesser powers must defer to great ones or pay the price. The UK, a country in a category all of its own when it comes to Kremlin resentments, has just been warned that it’s inline for such a punishment and I’m not sure that’s being taken seriously enough.” – Marc Champion, columnist at Bloomberg ($). The final sentence is a classic of masterly understatement. August 26th, 2026 | 22 comments
 Reform’s lack of history is what its enemies most enjoy pointing at, and they’re half right. We have no Butskellite settlement to draw on, no Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlets from 1978 with our name on the cover, no forty-year archive of Fabian tracts to be mined and misremembered. We have a party that is, in policy terms, seven years old and in serious policy terms about two. The page is blank, which is a double edged sword. A blank page has one great advantage. It owes nothing. There is no wing of the party that owns an economic orthodoxy and will sulk if it is departed from, no shadow of a previous government to be apologised for. Reform can walk down the corridor of every other party’s lockers and take whatever fits. Right to Buy was Margaret Thatcher’s. The two-child cap was George Osborne’s. The suitability test is older than either. A Conservative research department can’t do this. Every idea on its shelf has an owner objecting to its being moved. We have no shelf, so we have the run of everyone else’s, and the only question any idea has to answer is whether it will work, and whether it cleaves to our spine. The other edge of the blade is that it has all had to be done at once, and at pace, with no institutional memory to fall back on. There is no cupboard of half-finished papers to raid. Every document has to be started from nothing, argued through, costed, tested and released, while the same people fight a by-election in Clacton, run a few dozen councils and answer the phone to the Times. August 25th, 2026 | 12 comments
August 23rd, 2026 | 24 comments
I can answer this simply. William Shakespeare doesn’t send me a monthly letter threatening to send the boys round if I don’t give him money for something I don’t want, don’t need and don’t use. However, less flippantly, the BBC’s bias is blindingly obvious to anyone who takes even a passing look. The most egregious recent example being the Trump edit. But even before that, we have a flat refusal to engage with anyone who dares to disagree with the climate hysteria. Their COVID coverage was not only dire; it was blatantly untrue and hysterical. At no point did they do any journalism and question the inflated death figures coming out of Downing Street via Half-Whitty. August 22nd, 2026 | 24 comments
The N-word is very much the ultimate trigger-word right now. Despite this being a full article about this precise epithet, I am unable to easily use it. Just to be safe from malicious prosecution or algorithmic suppression, even free speech websites like the Daily Sceptic will generally use asterisks to obscure it as ‘n****r’, even though you all know perfectly well what full word the typography indicates. It’s not ‘number’ or ‘nectar’ (‘neuter’ might be quite appropriate, though). – Steven Tucker, writing In Minnesota, words matter more than rape. Words of Power lose their impact when overused or habitually misused, which is why “fascist” and “racist”, once useful categoric descriptions with specific meanings, now mean almost nothing beyond “someone I do not like and wish to place beyond the pale”. However “nigger”, absolutely a word of power in a strangely inverted way, is just a crass insult. Yet it is so powerful we’re required to render it as “the N-word”, akin to saying “Adonai” rather than the true name of God. Yet bizarrely in this two-tier civilization of ours, it becomes acceptable when used by melanin enhanced rappers, in which case it becomes something more akin to “geezer” or “my crew” or various other non-taboo things, depending on context. It’s a funny old world. August 21st, 2026 | 23 comments
August 20th, 2026 | 27 comments
The Telegraph has picked up an interesting story from the Los Angeles Times: “Polling putting Democratic Socialist in the lead was fake, admits firm”
Note that, although in that primary Median Strategies falsely raised the hopes of the extreme Left, in another contest the company put out fake polling that exaggerated the lead of the establishment Democrat over the extreme leftist:
I don’t know quite what to think of this. The Telegraph commenters, few of whom appear have read as far as the part about Bass vs Raman, think that this proves their long-held suspicion that all polls are lies put out by left wingers to artificially boost support for left wing ideas. This suspicion is not true. Polls are frequently wrong, they are sometimes skewed by the political biases of the people who set the questions and interpret the answers, but they are not generally made up. Reputable polling companies like YouGov and Ipsos scarcely make any profit from their political polls; their real business is market research. They do the voting intention polls to demonstrate their honesty, and to show that opinion polls can tease out meaningful information from the background noise. And I hate to say it, but millions upon millions of people truly support left wing ideas because it would be so nice if you really could make people rich and safe and good by decree. Getting back to Median Strategies, I see that the US media fell for the hoax. For once, I do not blame them. It was a genuinely interesting experiment but it destroys trust. Perhaps that is a good thing in a world full of increasingly sophisticated lies, but, somehow, this obscure story about some fake polls in a foreign country disturbed me more than one would expect. August 19th, 2026 | 21 comments
In 2011, with the glass barely swept up after the London riots, the think tank Demos measured Britain’s pride in itself and found it obstinately intact. A net 74% of us were proud to be British. Last week Demos ran the ruler over us again. The figure is 47%. Pride in Britain’s role in the world stands at 13%. The BBC, which fifteen years ago enjoyed a net pride score of 48%, now sits at minus 11, meaning more Britons are ashamed of the Corporation than proud of it. That last number is, I suppose, at least evidence that the public can still see straight. August 18th, 2026 | 5 comments
Compare the two cases and a pattern emerges. Cofnas cleared every formal bar that Cambridge erected—a competitive fellowship, a strong publication record, an eventual ruling that he’d broken no law and no policy—but he was punished anyway, and his position quietly expired while the university dithered. Arday did not clear the bars his professoriate peers had to clear, he was defended anyway, and he was propped up by administrators who failed to do due diligence. One scholar was punished for an opinion; the other was protected despite misconduct that objective methods could verify. Two different treatments, one shared instinct: expedience trumps evidence. August 17th, 2026 | 14 comments
“The Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) new platform promises a world without bills. In their utopia, you’d see no rent check. No health insurance premium. No student loan repayment. No electricity bill. Life’s basics, including food, education, medicine, and transportation, would all become `common goods and utilities.'” August 16th, 2026 | 22 comments
The British Medical Journal (BMJ) has been accused of damaging scientific integrity after retracting a paper which suggested that Covid vaccines may have been to blame for some excess deaths during the pandemic. In 2024, a group in the Netherlands published a paper in BMJ Public Health, warning that some pandemic deaths may have been caused by the indirect effects of containment measures and vaccination programmes, and calling for further investigation. The work was peer reviewed for nine months, and accepted as accurate by the BMJ, the UK’s leading medical journal. However, it was retracted this week after a slew of complaints and an investigation by the Princess Máxima Centre in Utrecht, where three of the four authors worked. The investigation found no evidence of malicious intent, fabrication or falsification of data, but still labelled the work as misleading and selective because it “did not reflect scientific consensus”, and had disproportionately focused on the negative effects of vaccination. – Sarah Knapton (£) August 16th, 2026 | 24 comments
The central fact of migration is that it is heavily path dependent, an idea laid out many years ago in Paul Collier’s Exodus. The number of people willing to move, in a world where travel is relatively cheap and safe, where wages are far higher elsewhere and established communities have already settled, is vast. This has already been illustrated by the natural experiment of North Cyprus, an unrecognised state in which citizens have the right to move to a richer country (Britain), and in which citizens of a poorer country (Turkey) have the right to move to. As a result, more Turkish Cypriots now live in Britain than in Cyprus, where they are outnumbered by Anatolian Turks. – Ed West August 15th, 2026 | 2 comments
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