The UK’s electricity crisis is not caused by “System Failure”. It’s caused by Net Zero
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Well, I suppose one of several silver linings of the current arguments about whether the UK should transfer ownership of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius (the legal case is weak, the strategic case is absurd) and the USA should buy Greenland from Denmark, is that those of us who are a bit off the pace with our geography have had a chance to remind ourselves where these places are, and why they matter. The Chagos Islands have been what are rather grandly called a British Indian Ocean Territory. The UK government, claiming that it is required to do so under international law (debatable), is to hand the islands to Mauritius – which is hundreds of miles away to the west of Chagos – and will pay Mauritius (a tax haven, by the way) for the ability to have control of said islands for a leasehold period of several decades. That means the UK can no longer decide if other countries – such as China – should be excluded, for example, from putting listening posts in the vicinity. The US military uses the Diego Garcia military base to operate long-haul flights, such as of the B2 stealth bomber and B52 bomber varieties, often to vital strategic effect. In 2025, when the Starmer government was pushing this arrangement to pass over the islands to Mauritius – and pay Mauritius billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money for the purpose (which is itself a disgrace) – the newly elected Trump administration appeared to be content with the deal, although some in the defence establishment appeared to be worried about the geo-strategic implications of opening a potential door to China in that part of the Indian Ocean. The Chagos transfer remains caught up in UK parliamentary wrangling, but I fear that it will go through – but maybe not if Trump’s comments in the past 24 hours have an impact. Mr Trump, who is angry at the UK for things such as allowing the Chinese to build a massive new embassy in London (with enhanced spying capabilities, no doubt), and about the UK’s criticism of his Greenland purchase demand (the UK is on firmer ground, if not entirely) has hit at the UK for the Chagos situation. Arguably, Trump’s move gives Starmer, if he is wise enough (is he, ed?) an “off-ramp” excuse to axe the Chagos transfer and put it down as a bad idea. (That would be the smart course, in my view.) Maybe even a smarter course would be for Starmer to let the US buy a stake in the Chagos Islands with a promise to let the UK still use the base on a joint basis. That would deal with America’s concerns about long-haul base access in the Indian Ocean and countering Chinese mischief-making, and perhaps take a bit of sting out of the Greenland issue. I haven’t space to go into the Greenland case, but suffice to say that I think a US invasion of land that is under Danish rule (Denmark is in NATO) is unlikely to happen and would be outrageous if it did. I think Trump will pull back and over time, some sort of arrangement will be reached once tempers cool. Greenland, given some icecap melting etc, is going to be easier for surface ships and submarines to navigate around, and that makes it an important place for the US/Canada/others to want to protect, given where it is on the map. But where the Greenland case is relevant in the Chagos case is that the US has a lease of a military base there (signed in 1951 – there were several attempts by the US to buy the place). And Trump has said that leaseholds aren’t enough – the US must own it. The logic he uses is similar to the logic that critics of the Chagos transfer have used – leaseholds aren’t enough because you must have the ability to exclude. Exclusion is the key issue here. Maybe, therefore, a way forward for Trump and other NATO powers is to insist that US/Western leases in Greenland must involve no such leases for China, Russia and others potentially hostile to NATO members, and that such leases should be reviewed, such as once every 10 years to account for changing geopolitics. The ability to show a measure of maturity on all sides – including ours in the UK – is critical. I worry that the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing pact between the UK, US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia is likely to end unless matters change. Starmer, who has been a clanking disaster of a Prime Minister, should stop goading the US by foolishly, and in my view fecklessly, giving every impression that the UK is becoming a useful idiot for Beijing. Whatever criticisms one might make of Trump’s recent foreign policy moves, on this occasion, he is more on the side of the angels than some might admit. Recently, I flicked through James C Bennett’s The Anglosphere Challenge, written more than 20 years ago, a few days ago. Reading it in light of recent events show what’s changed in the world, and what hasn’t. Recommended.
January 21st, 2026 | 41 comments
 “When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times. “Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do.” – Shabana Mahmood (£), Britain’s Home Secretary, explicitly states she wants to turn the country into a panopticon, quite literally a prison. Jeremy Bentham, an 18th-century philosopher and social theorist, promoted the Panopticon as a circular prison with a central inspection tower from which a single guard could observe all inmates all the time while unseen.
January 20th, 2026 | 17 comments
Britain is also eerily emulating a pattern of democratic backsliding; from India to Mexico, authoritarian governments “test-drive” what they can get away with at local level first. By conveniently delaying elections at a time when council tax is set to rise, Labour risks setting a wicked precedent for “taxation without representation”. – Sherelle Jacobs, Daily Telegraph (£). January 18th, 2026 | 20 comments
Away from the perma-misery of politics, wars, regulatory nonsense and so on, I came across this article on the Substack of the Rational Optimist Society (with a name like that, it is not a place to go for the doom-scrollers): “Housing is arguably the most broken industry in the world, with tough competition from healthcare and education. It’s a gigantic market that affects us all,” writes Stephen McBride. He argues that firms such as Cuby Technologies are doing for housing what shipping containers did for transportation and global trade, with massively positive effects. Cuby’s product is the Mobile Micro-Factory (MMFTM). It’s a standardized, portable factory that turns homebuilding into a predictable manufacturing process. I can see that acronym MMF, in this context, getting the same visibility as SMR for “small modular reactors”, and tapping into the same idea of using economies of scale, mass customisation and fiendishly clever computer tech to produce lots of useful, not eye-wateringly expensive things for our homes, power generators, whatever. And I can see, in time, how this fits with still-developing tech such as 3-D printing (which has been around a while). It will of course give some folk the vapours, such as those in the construction trades, much as happened with other disruptive changes. But if, for example, ageing and other forces squeeze labour market supply of people in such trades, then business models such as the MMF one, able to churn out homes, will have a lot of appeal. Plus new jobs can be created around design and all the associated, value-add opportunities that can arise. One aspect of all this is that if it lives up to the billing, the precision with which homes are built will be very high. Also, there is an appeal, is there not, for the likes of Elon Musk in figuring out how to efficiently produce things for spacefaring and the settlement of Mars. I can bet he is following all this closely. Final thought – for places that have suffered a devastating loss of housing (such as Southern California exactly a year ago because of the fires), being able to produce attractive homes at scale for people seems to have a lot of appeal. And, er, that’s where the horrible politics comes in. To date, only a fraction of the number of houses lost have been replaced. That is a shameful state of affairs, and one for which the local politicians deserve to pay a high price.
January 18th, 2026 | 24 comments
I can’t kid myself any more. The party hasn’t changed… and it won’t. The bulk of the party don’t get it. Don’t have the stomach for the radical change this country needs. In opposition, it’s easy to paper over these cracks, but the divisions – the delusions – are still there. And if we don’t get the next Government right, Britain will likely slip beyond the point of repair. Everything is on this. I cannot, in good conscience, stick with a party that’s failed so badly, that isn’t sorry and hasn’t changed. That I know in my heart won’t… can’t… deliver what’s needed. That’s why I resolved to leave. January 17th, 2026 | 18 comments
“So, where are the chants of ‘From The Gulf to the Caspian Sea, Iran will be free'”? – Allister Heath, asking a question that sort of gets a natural, logical answer: because Iran’s regime is against Israel and Jews, and against the West more generally. And in the minds of those who used to protest about Israel’s attacks on Hamas/Hezbollah and others, that is what counts. A few thousand people dead in Iran is all about the smashing eggs/omelette equation according to this anti-West calculus. In a way, this plays to the whole “two-tier” issue of the thinking about much of today’s Left (and the barmier forms of it on the Right): If you are on the “right” side of a particular argument (say that you are against Israel’s existence, or at least ambivalent about it), then it creates moral “space” to be indulgent towards regimes that are against Israel, etc. We see this over and over. (Daily Telegraph link behind paywall.) January 16th, 2026 | 19 comments
As the i reported, Emily Darlington, Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, ‘is seeking to make the Electoral Commission recommend enhanced DBS checks for candidates and then publish whether or not parties have agreed to the vetting. The aim is to ensure political parties justify whether their candidates are fit for office and name and shame those who refuse to participate.’ This is troubling when one considers that DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks include not just criminal history but ‘non-crime hate incidents’, which may even appear on the records of people who haven’t been contacted by police. These highly-political charges are far more likely to be directed at those with Right-wing opinions. When western European countries do things like this, I try to gauge whether this is normal by asking the question: what if Hungary did this? In most of these cases, I imagine the assessment would be that it was an assault on liberalism and democratic norms. In which case, what if Britain is undergoing the sort of ‘democratic backsliding’ usually levelled at central European countries with conservative governments? What if Keir Starmer is actually one of these illiberal ‘strongmen’ we read about, just not a very effective one. – Ed West January 15th, 2026 | 18 comments
Nick Timothy writes in the Telegraph:
In modern times, the British social contract was meant to be that we, the people, give up the right to use force to protect ourselves in exchange for the police protecting us. Cue Libertarian grumbling “I do not recall signing this contract”, but that is the Britain we used to live in. It wasn’t ideal but it wasn’t bad either. It was one of the better societies that have ever existed. The social contract relied on the idea that the only people permitted to arm themselves were servants of the state such as police officers or soldiers. If the state got wind that members of any other group – a white nationalist militia for example – were preparing to arm themselves in order to attack their enemies, an armed response unit would be kicking down their doors faster than you can say “Terrorism Act 2000”. Now that some sections of the police have acquiesced in other groups taking the right to arm themselves, and, worse yet, have covered up their shame by portraying the aggressors as victims and vice versa, what reason do we have to continue to grant them special status as the sole holders of the right and responsibility to bear arms? Without the majestic aura of the law around them, the police are just another gang. They are not even the dominant gang. January 14th, 2026 | 19 comments
Minnesota is not a happy place at the moment, what with the multi-billion-dollar welfare fraud story and now this:
Several Samizdata commenters are, if I recall correctly, those with law enforcement experience, so I’d be interested to know what the rights and wrongs are here. January 11th, 2026 | 114 comments
Dr. Mackail, in one of his recent essays, has laid fresh stress on this point when he says there were not enough Romans left to carry on the work of Rome. There are fears among those who are responsible for Government to-day, fears not yet gripping us by the throat, but taking grisly shape in the twilight, that the Great War, by the destruction of our best lives in such numbers, has not left enough of the breed to carry on the work of the Empire. Our task is hard enough, but it will be accomplished ; yet who in Europe does not know that one more war in the West and the civilization of the ages will fall with as great a shock as that of Rome ? She has left danger signals along the road ; it is for us to read them. – Stanley Baldwin (Prime Minister as was), 9 January 1926. Maybe fear of a repeat of the collapse of the Roman Empire is an ever-present feature of Western civilisation. I still fear it though. January 11th, 2026 | 17 comments
It is not a victim of the collapse of the ‘rules-based order’, but of its own terrible decisions. The cause of Europe’s shift into blandness and relative economic decline is not mysterious: it has developed into a top-down corporatist bureaucracy, where incumbents and well-connected lobbyists always push for ever more regulation until nimbler challengers do the rational thing and relocate to the United States. It is an awkward model for a continent whose historic edge was the opposite: dispersed power, fierce competition between jurisdictions, and constant pressure to innovate. Too often, the officials presiding over this drift are so far removed from the realities they regulate that, when growth stalls, they cannot talk intelligently about incentives, productivity, or risk-taking. So instead they reach for comforting abstractions about “values” and “leadership”. – Mark Brolin (£) January 10th, 2026 | 5 comments
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