“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.'”
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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 However, it was retracted this week after a slew of complaints and an investigation by the Princess Máxima Centre in Utrecht, where three of the four authors worked.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 | 5 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 | One comment
But eventually one notices that the Tories cannot achieve the easy things either. They cannot stop the boats because the Blob is too powerful. They cannot build houses because the planning system is too powerful. They cannot cut spending because the Treasury is too powerful. They cannot reform the NHS because the NHS is too powerful. And now they cannot liberalise Soho because the Soho Society is too powerful. There is one common denominator here, folks: it is called the Conservative Party. – John Hardy (£) August 13th, 2026 | 25 comments
Standing at the fence I found myself asking what a Cochrane would do now, and the answer is uncomfortable, because the need for one is so plain. Our age has its Basque Roads, victories thrown away by commanders unwilling to close. It has its prize-court corruption in the procurement billions that vanish without a ship, a road or a reactor to show for them. Above all it has its Stock Exchange trials. Ask the sub-postmasters. Ask the infected blood families. The machine that ruined Cochrane, the machine that would rather destroy the innocent than admit error, has never been better fed. His modern heir would fight it as the original did, by knowing it better than its own officers. Cochrane was an engineer’s son and an inventor to his fingertips, and his heir would read a procurement database the way Cochrane read Spanish gunnery, as a system with a blind spot waiting to be boarded. He would use parliamentary privilege to name names. He would be unclubbable, immune to honours, indifferent to the lobby. And he would accept the price, to be ruined at least once, publicly and with relish, by the people he had frightened, and to come back over the prison wall. August 10th, 2026 | 8 comments
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 material covering Extreme Right-Wing falls well below the threshold’. Shawcross mentioned that he ‘saw one RICU analysis product from 2020 on Right-Wing terrorist and extremist activity online which referenced books by mainstream British conservative commentators as “key cultural nationalist ideological texts”. The same document listed “key texts” for white nationalists as including historic works of the Western philosophic and literary canon’. Shawcross also describes RICU analysis of a ‘cohort of social media users it termed “Actively Patriotic and Proud”, listed a prominent Conservative politician and former member of the government as being among figures “associated with far-right sympathetic audiences, and Brexit”’ (who I understand to be Jacob Rees-Mogg). This then, is RICU now. An organisation which seeks to ‘counter extremist narratives’ and maintains ‘contingency communication’ materials ‘for rapid deployment after major incidents’. The methods they deploy are ‘never published’. August 8th, 2026 | 6 comments
“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. August 7th, 2026 | 13 comments
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. I recognised the moment for what it was. A rite of passage, and an attempt to place a boundary around my speech. Informing her as I did so, I reached for my phone and began recording, as much for posterity as for evidence. August 5th, 2026 | 10 comments
“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.” – “Ivana“, a Substack author. The whole item is a gem. It is also funny because it is true, even if I quibble about the author’s comment that housing is a “right” and that big business should be broken up by anti-trust. Even so, for political perceptiveness, this is good. August 3rd, 2026 | 17 comments
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! August 2nd, 2026 | 5 comments
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 officers at least know who to speak to. In places where there’s actually a community to begin with, a neighbourhood policing team can make a difference. On the other hand, some ‘communities’ are chaotic, transient and divided. They’re riven by gangs and organised criminals. As tactics like stop and search and use of force become hotly contested, these communities become abandoned by police officers worried about losing their jobs. The community leaders who do exist are often hostile. A neighbourhood policing team’s at an immediate disadvantage – their role becomes more like counterinsurgency than policing. George Dixon wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. Well, he would, until the IOPC had him up for assault. These are places which, unfortunately, politicians like to ignore. They pretend they’re policed by consent. It’s easier to blame the police for societal problems law enforcement can never, and will never, solve. If you are interested in policing in the UK and all things Plod, I recommend Dominic Alder. August 1st, 2026 | 12 comments
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 nothing, bring nobody, occupy no housing list, no school place, no waiting room. They work at a speed almost no one in this country can currently match, and then they go home to shear in their own summer. In January the Home Office announced that they were no longer welcome. July 31st, 2026 | 10 comments
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