This cult of safety has risen inexorably alongside the bloated state, the proliferation of lanyards dangling from corporate necks like talismans or morality nooses, – I mean look at us here, at the Margaret Thatcher Centre all proudly wearing our own blue ropes – and the insidious creep of human resources culture. HR departments, those modern inquisitors, enforce “safe spaces” where dissent is heresy, and risk assessments stifle innovation and free speech goes to die. It’s a world where playgrounds are padded to absurdity, and employees are trained not in skills, but in avoiding offence. This isn’t safeguarding; it’s societal strangulation, a slow garrote on the British spirit.
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Kudos to the Guardian for not soft-pedalling this:
That is not much of a defence. Money is fungible. Later, the article quotes from a letter written by Chomsky praising Epstein:
In fairness, all that stuff about penetrating insights and thoughtful appraisals was probably true. Epstein would not have been able to rise as high – or sink as low – as he did without being able to read people. Epstein’s forte was befriending famous people, introducing them to each other, being at the centre of the networks of the global elite. My guess is that of the pleasures this position brought him, the status ranked higher in his mind than the money or the sex. Added 23rd November: I am going to take the liberty of promoting a slightly edited version of something I wrote in the comments in reply to this excellent comment by Fraser Orr to the main post. Fraser Orr writes, “FWIW, I find it a bit disturbing that mere association with this loathsome man (Epstein that is) that somehow convicts the associate”. I quite agree. Apart from the importance of the presumption of innocence in all circumstances, i.e. criminal or near-criminal wrongdoing needs to be proved, it should be obvious that a big part of the appeal of the sexual services that Epstein was offering was exclusivity. It wouldn’t have worked if everyone was invited. But I don’t think there’s any suggestion that Chomsky was involved in the sex stuff at all. My guess is what Epstein got out of associating with Chomsky was the feeling that he was an intellectual too, and one of the things Chomsky got out of associating with Epstein was a frisson of transgressiveness. He was above such bourgeois conventions as refusing to talk to someone who had been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor. But it looks very much as if the other thing Noam Chomsky got from his association with Jeffrey Epstein was money. “Chomsky, 96, had also reportedly acknowledged receiving about $270,000 from an account linked to Epstein while sorting the disbursement of common funds relating to the first of his two marriages” This sounds evasive. What does the thing about “sorting the disbursement of common funds” even mean? It sounds like something to do with calculating how the money should be split between him and his first wife. I can see how working out how to divide joint earnings after a marriage ends might be complicated, but why did Noam Chomsky doing whatever he was doing regarding money from his first marriage require Jeffrey Epstein to send him more than quarter of a million dollars? For an intellectual to take money from a disreputable but very rich patron is not a crime, but all those who laud Chomsky as a fearless social justice advocate and opponent of abusive power might like to reconsider their tributes. November 22nd, 2025 | 23 comments
 The Telegraph reports,
The part I have put in bold type looks alarming. On the other hand, the British press, most definitely including the Telegraph, continually tries to make Trump look as bad as possible. In the first few months after Putin invaded, Ukraine’s resolute defence against the odds saved the country from annihilation – but as the war drags on its position seems to be gradually weakening. What do you think? Is this the best deal Ukraine is likely to get? November 21st, 2025 | 37 comments
We’re told that students perform better when exposed to “different formats”. This is fair enough in principle, though the guidelines decline to specify what these formats might be, beyond implying there will be an impressive number of them. One can already picture the future: a single course requiring essays, posters, podcasts, puppet shows and a short stop-motion film made from Play-Doh – each designed to develop the student’s confidence, creativity and capacity to perform self-expression in increasingly unhinged ways. Next, the document warns that “Standard Academic English” (once known as “English”) is an oppressive tool that advantages “already privileged students”. The implication, apparently, is that requiring coherent writing is a form of violence. This is the educational equivalent of a gym announcing that push-ups are discriminatory because they favour those with upper-body strength. November 20th, 2025 | 6 comments
I remember him announcing this on YouTube. It was, frankly, appalling. Classic police overreach and the school complaining was typical of the thin skinned using lawfare to shut down critical voices. Yet it all came to nothing as the case was dropped. As any reasonable person would expect it to be. The correct approach to the initial complaint would have been to warn the complainant of the penalties for wasting police time.
But they will, because it wasn’t a mistake. Until there are personal consequences, this will continue to happen. November 18th, 2025 | 6 comments
“Parents ‘vindicated’ after police admit unlawful arrest over WhatsApp row”, the Guardian reports. The subheading is “Hertfordshire police agree to pay £20,000 to Rosalind Levine and Maxie Allen, who were held for 11 hours after complaining about daughter’s school”. I posted about this couple’s experience last April: Boiling frogs in Salem and Hertfordshire. One aspect of the story that the Free Speech Union’s Frederick Attenborough highlighted at the time was that Hertfordshire Police didn’t just put the frighteners on Rosalind Levine and Maxie Allen, they also threatened – in writing – their local county councillor, Michelle Vince, that if she continued to advocate on their behalf she too might find herself “liable to being recorded as a suspect in a harassment investigation”. And they told Michelle Vince to pass on that warning to the local MP, Sir Oliver Dowden. As Sir Oliver said in the Times, “Police risk ‘curtailing democracy’ by stopping MPs doing their job”. Today’s Guardian article continues,
You wish. Further comment is both appropriate and necessary. There bloody well are issues of misconduct involving at least one officer in relation to this matter: whichever officer tried to frighten off both a local councillor and an MP from representing their constituents. November 17th, 2025 | 17 comments
The sudden resignations this week of BBC director-general Tim Davie and CEO of news Deborah Turness has focussed minds on the role of the media. It has been startling – and grimly predictable – to watch senior figures at the BBC scrambling to defend their failures by muttering darkly about ‘right-wing conspiracies’ and ‘inside jobs’. Few, if any, have paused to consider whether the real problem might be their own cowardice. The same rot runs through mainstream media across the world. In Ireland, I’ve met too many well-paid figures at RTÉ, the Irish Times and the Irish Independent who seem serenely proud of their refusal to touch anything remotely controversial. I call it Hugh Linehan syndrome, since, as duty editor of the Irish Times and host of the popular Inside Politics podcast, he appears to be particularly self-satisfied, even self-righteous, about his ability to avoid difficult issues. November 16th, 2025 | 23 comments
In a series of reports, I have shown that the European Union already operates a vast propaganda and censorship apparatus that spans every level of civil society — NGOs, think tanks, the media and even academia. The cornerstone of this system is a network of EU-funded programmes — notably CERV (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values), Creative Europe and the Jean Monnet initiative — that collectively funnel billions of euros into organisations that are, in theory, “independent” but are in fact deeply enmeshed in the Brussels machine. November 15th, 2025 | 8 comments
“Hurricane Melissa a ‘real-time case study’ of colonialism’s legacies”, writes Natricia Duncan for the Guardian. The subheading is “Destruction in Jamaica shows why climate justice cannot be separated from reparatory justice, campaigners say”. The article starts with a sympathetic couple of paragraphs about the history of Gurney’s Mount Baptist Church, a church whose roof was ripped off by the hurricane.
I find that sad, and I hope this community gets some help to rebuild after the hurricane. Though I have a low opinion of the long-term efficacy of taxpayer-funded foreign aid, and think it is actively harmful when it encourages a dependency economy, if we must have it, let the money be spent on helping victims of natural disasters like this one. I think a lot of people feel the same way. But may God preserve Rev. Bowen from some of the people who want to help him.
You know what will happen? The people from governmental, inter-governmental and so-called Third Sector aid organisations that victims of natural disasters in the Caribbean deal with most often talk like Mariama Williams and her white counterparts. They, the victims, will pick up the impression from the Climate Justice people that the way to get financial aid these days is to talk like this:
In 2020, two thirds of Britons supported cutting the foreign aid budget. I doubt the British people have warmed to it since then. But if giving taxpayer-funded aid to poor countries is unpopular now, wait till you see how unpopular it will be if it is packaged as punishing ordinary British people for a small fraction of their distant ancestors having owned slaves. I predict that even private donations will become more scarce the more often reparations are mentioned. Oh, and they’ll never get the reparations. November 15th, 2025 | 9 comments
The ideological divide within MAGA has grown increasingly harsh. Trump is not, at heart, a professional politician. Rather, he is a blend of New York developer and carnival barker. His uneasy alliance with ‘tech bros’, Wall Street insiders and fervent right-wing nativists was never stable. It was held together mostly by Trump himself – and by the awfulness of the Democrats. Even as he strikes a populist pose, some people influential in MAGA flirt with ideas like eugenic Darwinism and a permanent ruling aristocracy. Others within MAGA embrace isolationism and attacks on minorities, particularly Jews. Trump rejects such notions, but too many top GOP figures, argues Senator Ted Cruz, seem terrified of alienating the odious Tucker Carlson to do so. November 14th, 2025 | 72 comments
This tweet from “GnasherJew” includes a video clip from a lecture on “The Birth of Zionism” given by Dr Samar Maqusi for the group “UCL Students for Justice in Palestine” on 11th November 2025. Dr Marqusi is currently Research Associate at University College London’s Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL). (“Her work looks into the politics of space-making inside the Palestine refugee camps. More recently, she has been investigating modes of sociality and vitality in refugee camps inside a burdened Lebanon. Previously, Samar worked with UNRWA (UN Agency for Palestine refugees) as an Architect/Physical Planner, focusing on programmes of shelter rehabilitation and camp improvement.”) Update: It looks like I pressed “publish” too soon. Never mind, you can enjoy seeing this post made in real time. Watch the video clip. It shows an academic in University College, London (UCL) spreading the blood libel. For anyone new to the term, a blood libel is a specific sort of anti-Jewish propaganda in which Jews are said to have murdered Christians for ritual purposes, often including baking their blood into bread. The genre goes back to the thirteenth century cult of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln. The spreading of such tales is usually the precursor to a pogrom, as it was in Lincoln in 1255. Dr Samar Maqusi said this to her students the day before yesterday:
This one is known as “the Damascus Affair” or “the Damascus Blood Libel”. It’s famous enough to appear in lists of historical blood libels. I wasn’t expecting to see it related as fact in 2025 in one of the top ten universities in the world. Like every conspiracy theorist ever born, Dr Maqusi peppers her speech with literal and metaphorical “uptalk”, little get-out clauses such as “the story goes” and “draw your own narrative”, so that if challenged she can claim to be “just asking questions”. But she felt safe enough to speak as she did, and, with the delayed exception of whoever recorded her, her student audience did not challenge her. As ever, I do not seek to use the law to silence Dr Maqusi. I want it made clear to all how common and accepted her views are among the pro-Palestinian movement, and among Palestinians. I do think that unless UCL takes action their Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policy will be revealed as an empty sham, but if that is the case I would rather know about it. Update: Dan Souter points out in the comments that UCL has apologised and Dr Maqusi’s profile has been removed from the UCL website. The link is to an article by David Rose in Unherd. I commend the Provost’s decisive action to protect his university’s reputation, but I do find it disquieting that in just five years universities across the English-speaking world went from beating their breasts in penitence for the most minuscule and indirect manifestations of racism – here is UCL’s 2020 statement on Black Lives Matter and here is an account from its website of how it “denamed” buildings named after a couple of Victorian eugenicists because seeing the old names has “a profound impact on the sense of belonging that we want all of our staff and students to have” – to this. November 13th, 2025 | 19 comments
That is certainly one way of putting it. Another is that, first, the Trump stuff is much less important than the BBC’s issues in other areas and that it seems modestly significant that Goodall devotes almost no space at all in his lengthy Substack piece to any of those issues. Secondly, at no point does Goodall bother considering whether some or any of the criticisms made by Prescott and Grossman have any validity at all. That, however, seems a necessary starting point. News judgement is often a nuanced and complex business. News “values”, on the other hand, should be comparatively straightforward. This is where it is entirely reasonable to convict the BBC’s coverage of the sex & gender wars. For here the corporation largely – though with notable exceptions, especially Hannah Barnes on Newsnight – picked a side and chose the one that required BBC journalists to sacrifice their judgement. Ideology trumped basic news values. They said it was dry when in fact it wasn’t obviously dry at all. For once again, among the most important of those values is this eternal question: Is This True? There is blood in the water and the sharks are circling. This story is going to run and run and run 😀 November 12th, 2025 | 17 comments
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