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Magatte Wade is an African anti-poverty activist. No, not like you’re thinking – she’s an actual anti-poverty activist. In fact her chosen term to describe what she does is “prosperity activist”. In a tweet made yesterday, she wrote, https://x.com/magattew/status/1986537994984058913
I think that is true. November 7th, 2025 | 38 comments
 Kruger’s presentation began with the announcement of Reform’s intention to develop a far more detailed agenda for government than any incoming administration in recent memory, including a range of pre-written legislation to give them a running start to their first term in office. In addition, the party will have candidates lined up for key appointments, bringing in ‘expertise, advice and executive capacity’ from outside Whitehall, to both civil service leadership and ministerial roles. The intention, according to Kruger, is to ensure that a Reform Government is positioned to give a clear list of priorities to civil servants upon entering Downing Street — not the other way around. – Pimlico Journal newsletter November 6th, 2025 | 19 comments
On paper, he is the kind of Democrat that might have been invented in a laboratory of perverted social science by a MAGA Dr. Frankenstein: a socialist, an immigrant, a Muslim, son of a movie director and a professor of postcolonialism, holder of a degree in “Africana studies,” a 34-year-old whose experience runs the gamut from co-founder of the Bowdoin College chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine to membership of the New York state Assembly for the last five years, with stints as a rap producer and tenant organizer. Have I missed anything? Well, his employment experience does include a gig as “third assistant director” on the 2016 Disney movie “Queen of Katwe,” whose director, Mira Nair, is Zohran’s mom. – Gerard Baker, writing in the Wall Street Journal about Zohran Mamdani, who won by a clear vote yesterday night. That old line from H L Mencken of people getting the government they want “good and hard” is getting a lot of use these days. November 5th, 2025 | 45 comments
The Green Party are calling the scarcity of resources into play as an argument against the efficient use of resources. They’re mad. QED. November 4th, 2025 | 9 comments
The Telegraph has a story – with accompanying videos – that ought to finish several careers at the BBC: “Exclusive: BBC ‘doctored’ Trump speech, internal report reveals”. What Trump actually said: “We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down any one you want but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong…I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” And 54 minutes later: “Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say I wanna thank you very much, and they go off to some other life but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.” What the spliced-together BBC version made it look like Trump said: “We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, And immediately afterwards:
In case your screen is not showing all the lines through most of the second version, the falsely edited BBC version made it look like Trump said, “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.” November 3rd, 2025 | 22 comments
Macron insists he’s defending democracy from manipulation and hate. But that’s the excuse. His vision is of a Europe where free speech is tolerated only when it is traceable, and where platforms pre-emptively silence anything that might draw a regulator’s glare. He calls it a ‘resurgence of democracy’. It’s nothing of the kind. It’s the bureaucratisation of thought, and the beginning of a continent where debate survives only on licence. If Macron has his way, Europe’s public square will not just be regulated, it will be licensed. Of course UK is no better. November 3rd, 2025 | 6 comments
It seems like only yesterday that I posted this in 2021 :“The background and motive of yesterday’s attacks were unclear”. And here we are again. It has been hours since the mass stabbing on a train travelling from Doncaster to Kings Cross. There were many witnesses. Two men have been arrested. No other suspects are sought. I find it hard to believe that the background and motive of yesterday’s attacks really do remain unclear to the police, the government, or the press. But they certainly have not been made clear to the public. The Home Secretary has urged the public to “avoid comment and speculation at this early stage”. There are times when this is good advice. This is not one of them. “Nature abhors a vacuum” is never more true when the vacuum is one of information about a crime that makes millions think, “That could be me”. Did you learn nothing from Southport? The only thing that will dissipate the hurricane of speculation is to replace it with facts. It is not as if your strategy of politically correct evasiveness is working. It hasn’t worked for years. Update: one of the arrested men was innocent and has been released. The only suspect for this crime has now been named as Anthony Williams, aged 32. This development makes the slowness of the police to release any details worse, not better. Williams is black. Those who were inclined to believe that the authorities were trying to avoid saying that the two suspects were Muslim are not going to say, “Oh, how foolish I was” when it turns out the only suspect is black. Furthermore official tardiness meant that an innocent man was under a cloud for long after it should have been clear that he was innocent. What were they playing at? November 2nd, 2025 | 41 comments
Across all these laws, the pattern is the same: more data collection, more sharing between agencies, and more pressure on companies to watch what users do. The justification is usually ‘national security or ‘protecting the public,’ but once these systems are in place, they rarely stay limited to their original goals. The Parliament Act was passed to limit the powers of the Lords in cases of ‘vital national emergency.; Tony Blair used it to force through a ban on fox-hunting. From intercepting letters centuries ago to scanning emails and social media today, governments have always found reasons to pry. The technology has changed, but the instinct remains the same, and so does the question: how much surveillance is too much? November 1st, 2025 | 3 comments
Now, zoom out to the regulatory burden, a beast fed by both parties. The Tories kicked it off with gusto. In 2015, George Osborne slashed mortgage interest relief, fully phasing it out by 2020, landlords could no longer deduct full interest from taxable income, effectively hiking taxes by up to 20% for higher-rate payers. Add the 2016 3% stamp duty land tax (SDLT) surcharge on buy-to-lets, which cooled purchases by 10-15% per industry estimates. EPC rules tightened too: from 2018, rentals needed at least an E rating, with fines for non-compliance; by 2025, proposals aimed for C by 2030, costing landlords £8,000-£15,000 per property in upgrades. Right to Rent, introduced in 2014 and expanded, mandated immigration checks with £3,000 fines per illegal tenant. The 2019 promise to scrap Section 21 evictions lingered unresolved until Labour grabbed the baton, but it fuelled uncertainty, prompting a landlord sell-off wave. Labour, far from easing the pain, has doubled down. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025, royal assent in October, bans Section 21 outright (implementation mid-2026), mandates periodic tenancies, and limits rent hikes to once yearly at market rates—with challenges via tribunals. Pets can’t be unreasonably refused, and bidding wars are outlawed. Selective licensing proliferates: councils like Southwark charge £600-£750 per property for five years, with paperwork galore. Fines for breaches? Up to £30,000, as Reeves learned. Right to Rent enforcement has “rocketed” under Labour, with penalties hitting £4.2m recently versus £596k pre-election, a 600%+ spike, per Home Office data. No wonder a 2025 Landlord Today survey cited “political pressure” as a top exit reason for 40% of landlords. Impacts? Catastrophic for small players. October 31st, 2025 | 16 comments
“Victims petrify politicians”, writes “Bagehot” in the Economist. (Alternative link here.) “They are apex stakeholders. Normal rules for decisions—risk, cost, proportionality—are thrown away when they are involved. What if a headline suggests ministers snubbed victims? Write the cheque. Civil servants, always cautious, become cowards. Campaigners know this. The unedifying spectacle of a grieving parent wheeled in front of cameras to push a particular policy, whether limits on smartphones or ninja swords, has become a political trump card.” “Has become”? One of my few criticisms of this admirably unaccommodating article is that it talks as if this development were new. That voters and hence governments cannot bear to disagree with a victim was already old news in the days when the cheques being written really were cheques. It was an established political pattern in 2001 when I wrote a piece for the Libertarian Alliance about the reaction to the gun massacre at Dunblane.
(Alternative link here.) Bagehot continues:
The word “rightly” is not here a term of praise. “Martyn’s Law”, like nearly every law named after a victim, is a bad law that should never have been passed. But the blame for it should not fall on Martyn’s mother. God knows she never wanted to be labelled “Victim’s Mother” on the chyron. She never wanted to be in a position such that her opinions on measures to take against terrorism were of interest to anyone. She never sought to be a lawmaker; never claimed she would be any good at it. The man who should be blamed did. October 31st, 2025 | 14 comments
It is a constant struggle to keep a well founded scepticism descending into the kooksphere. There are shit loads of opportunists looking to take advantage of those suspicious of mainstream perspectives and narratives, and it’s hardly just incels stuck in their bedrooms who step on such rakes. It’s curious how James Lindsay, for example, went from debunking woke to formulating conspiracy theories about Michaelmas. Or how James Delingpole went from climate change scepticism to 9/11 trutherism or that dinosaurs are a hoax. A sad fact is that such dissidents often make themselves quite harmless to the ruling elites. Banging on about dinosaurs, fake moon landings, anti-popery conspiracies etc to the plebs doesn’t bother the elites in the slightest. It both diverts and discredits dissent down rabbit holes. Governments have often themselves covertly pushed conspiracy theories for that reason. – Martin October 30th, 2025 | 36 comments
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