The reason the Conservative Party is dying, is that they have come to believe that their task is to run the Socialist State more efficiently than Labour.
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April 16th, 2026 | 3 comments
 Yes, but what do you do about it? Here are some possibilities: 1. Tell them not to. But how are you going to know if they are complying? A Reform government is not going to have the personnel it can trust to do this. 2. Make them fully independent. End grants, abolish student loans. You could even remove their Royal Charters. There’s going to be a hell of a backlash. But if you can get through that they should get back to education again. 3. Make university education less attractive. I’ve heard it said that people need degrees because IQ tests are illegal. Is that true? 4. Declare all universities “indoctrination centres” and remove all funding until proved otherwise. If they bleat about “independence” then you can say they’ve got what they wanted. The proof could be in the form of each member of academic staff being asked for their opinions on communism and DEI. Could produce some interesting results. … @Patrick Crozier Of course we have that technology, it is called the internet. For the most part (outside of some specific professions) universities provide students with four things: an education (Which is now no longer relevant since you can learn anything 1% of the cost by other means), a certification, which surely we can legally circumvent by setting up a skills based certification system (though see below), networking opportunities which only really matter at very high end and lower end universities — the majority in the middle do not provide value here, and a fourth, letting the kids PARTY. Presumably kids can have a really good time elsewhere too. The certification is the big issue, but surely there are other ways to prove one’s skills? Certainly in my area of expertise I’d rather have someone as a Certified AWS architect than a poncey degree from Harvard. That is a cultural change though, and I think it is coming. But in truth AI and robotics is going to largely eliminate jobs in this middle part anyway. I say let them die their natural death. One easy fix? Eliminate student loans and payments and let students bear the full cost of their education while keeping the government out of the “student loan” business. That’d shake things up PDQ. As I said there are exceptions, people with highly specialized training like Medical doctors and lawyers. April 15th, 2026 | 4 comments
The instructions? “Focus on ideas, not grammar.” Reward “the use of culture, language and identity.” Embrace “linguistic diversity.” Decolonise the curriculum. “Validate diverse knowledge systems and lived experiences.” Reduce essay word counts to ease “stress.” Ditch proper exams. Let students pick formats that suit their precious “identity.” This isn’t assessment reform. It’s compulsory brainwashing with a marking sheet. The university’s own Quality Assurance Handbook makes the ideological capture explicit: everything must align with King’s Strategic Vision 2029, embedding EDI, sustainability and “inclusivity” as non-negotiable from day one. One anonymous KCL academic told the Mail students will soon be able to challenge grades on the grounds their “culture and identity” wasn’t sufficiently validated. Fantastic. Nothing screams “world-class education” like turning every essay into a victimhood Olympics where clarity is penalised and grievance is gold. April 14th, 2026 | 12 comments
Hundreds of British girls were raped by grooming gangs while Mr Blair was the prime minister. Of course, this was a more diffuse, less murderous phenomenon than October 7. But it is hard to stomach lectures about what must be done in the face of evil from someone whose government did absolutely nothing. Of course, mistreating innocent people should have been unjustifiable in both cases. But Blair should be the last person to hold forth on “removing threats”. Anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism are certainly dangerous, but so is Tony Blair, and just as I don’t want to listen to a Wahhabi cleric on Western foreign policy, I don’t want to listen to Blair on Islamism. Can we pay him to go away? I’ll set up a GoFundMe. April 3rd, 2026 | 6 comments
“Sovereignty is not merely the technical possibility of making a one‑off decision. It is the continuing ability to govern yourself: to set and revise your own rules in the light of your own needs. When you adopt the regulatory framework of a foreign power, when commercial realities make reversal prohibitively costly and when you have no seat at the table where the rules are made, you may have exercised a choice at the outset but you have chosen powerless subordination thereafter.” – Steve Baker, former Conservative MP and campaigner for the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. He’s unhappy at the machinations of the current Labour government, and I share his annoyance. March 29th, 2026 | 15 comments
The suffering of Gaza, the death and destruction, is undeniable. You can make a legitimate criticism of Israel’s tactics in the conduct of the war. Many Jews around the world make exactly those critiques. But you cannot engage in such criticism legitimately if you do not also condemn the terrorism of October 7. You cannot pretend that Israel does not face a substantial terrorist threat from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Iranian regime, and other groups that do not recognize Israel’s right to exist. You cannot complain about the restrictions on goods and material going in and out of Gaza unless you also reference the reasons for the restrictions: the fear in Israel that such materials will be used for the purpose of building a terrorist infrastructure, which is precisely what nearly 300 miles of tunnels underneath Gaza represent. – Tony Blair, who is not someone often quoted favourably in this particular parish (£) March 28th, 2026 | 18 comments
It is easy to underestimate how radical a change in strategy this is. It simply would not have been possible in previous wars. Airpower capable of striking significantly behind the front lines did not exist until World War 2. Since then, command and control structures have been too widely dispersed and hardened to make broad attacks on them even theoretically possible until now. Yes, countries sometimes try to kill each other’s top leaders. But assassinations are less common than civilians realize. Leaders generally do not target each other directly in wars — maybe hoping for a similar courtesy from the other side, or maybe because killing the other side’s leaders can make negotiating peace more difficult. In any case, what Israel and the United States are trying is not a singular assassination but continuous attacks on a national command structure while at the same time sparing civilians to the extent possible. (Yes, the United States appears to have killed almost 200 girls in a Tomahawk attack. But the strike was clearly a mistake, not a strategic choice. It has not been repeated, and the United States is not trying to defend it.) The American-Israeli goal is very clear: to convince the people at the top of the Iranian regime that they, and their replacements, and their replacements’ replacements, will die, and die very soon, unless they capitulate. Can this strategy work? I don’t know. Since it’s never been tried before, I’m not sure anyone does. March 21st, 2026 | 20 comments
Because money isn’t wealth. It’s a claim on wealth. You can print claims. You can’t print the goods and services those claims are supposed to buy. Give everyone $10 billion and nothing gets richer. Prices just explode until that “wealth” buys nothing. Poverty isn’t a shortage of paper. Printing money doesn’t solve that. It hides it for a moment, then makes it worse. March 20th, 2026 | 13 comments
Zack Polanski may be terrible at economics, but he is a great entrepreneur — a political entrepreneur, that is. The lesson from Corbynmania, the Greta Thunberg movement, BLM, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, the gender movement and the Palestine movement is that there is a lot of vaguely youthful, vaguely left-wing, vaguely anti-capitalist political energy around. That energy was looking for a political outlet, a gap in the market which Polanski spotted and filled. I wish he had used his talents to become an actual entrepreneur in the private sector instead, creating wealth rather than promoting ideas that destroy it. For those blissfully unaware of Zack Polanski (original name is David Paulden), here is some information about his approach to foreign affairs. Assuming he is sincere, he is mad, or it may be that he is simply intellectually depraved. March 19th, 2026 | 10 comments
The response to the Iran-Hezbollah drone attack on Britain’s Royal Air Force Base in Cyprus earlier this month has been revealing. For the first time since 1980, Britain had no warships in the eastern Mediterranean or the Gulf. Air defences were effectively absent. The UK’s main carrier strike group was still en route to Greenland. Britain ended up having to rely on Greece and France to help secure its own military base. That is not evidence of foreign capture. It is evidence of institutional incompetence. March 9th, 2026 | 17 comments
The truth of course is that ‘Net Zero’ is an article of faith. A state religion masquerading as a moral crusade despite the evidence it is expensive, ineffective, and generally regressive. Low carbon subsidies transfer wealth from the general population to landowners and corporations. It’s state socialism delivering a caricature of pre-Corn Laws Toryism. March 8th, 2026 | 16 comments
There is far more heat energy in a swimming pool than in a pan of boiling water. You can boil an egg in the pan. You can’t boil an egg in the pool. And if you doubled the size of the pool, you’d double the energy available — and still have a cold, raw egg. This is not a riddle. It is the single most important concept in the energy debate, and almost nobody making energy policy understands it. […] The proposal to replace gas and nuclear with wind and solar reverses the direction of every successful energy transition in human history. It moves down the density ladder, deliberately, and hopes for the best. That is what I mean when I say current energy policy is in a head-on collision with physics. Read the whole thing. March 5th, 2026 | 55 comments
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