If you want to understand Andy Burnham, the only thing you’ll ever have to read is… this.
I was going to tag this as “humour”, but it’s too true to be haha funny.
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Well, in the nine years since the slaughter at Manchester Arena, our elites have continued to “choose love” by leaving our borders wide open, which has continued to allow some people who prefer to ‘choose hate’ to come here and attack us. The Belfast-based writer and podcaster Jenny Holland quite aptly and wittily remarked in last week’s episode of her highly recommended podcast that instead of an anti-racist demonstration, perhaps an anti-beheading rally would be the more fitting response to an attempted public beheading. We live in such demented times that coming out publicly as beheadophobic is probably a cancellable offence in much of the public sector and creative industries that are dominated by open borders fanatics. June 20th, 2026 | 14 comments
 Our leaders usually condemn the disorder and violence that follows, but will refuse to discuss the triggers in any depth. Anyone who asks what can be done about horrors like that inflicted on Stephen Ogilvie will be accused of stoking division, exploiting a tragedy and courting the far right. But something can and must be done. It is simply no longer sustainable to force working-class communities to endure such levels of terror, to bear the brunt of the elites’ open-door experiment – to pay the ‘blood price’, as Brendan O’Neill describes it, of the establishment’s virtue-signalling. Practically every day brings new horrors that ordinary folk are simply expected to put up with. On the very same day as the Sudanese suspect was charged with attempted murder, four Afghan nationals appeared in court, all charged with the alleged rape of a Bristol schoolgirl. From gang rapes in Brighton and grooming gangs in Norwich to child rape in Warwickshire, countless British citizens continue to suffer at the hands of men who shouldn’t be here. Yet this barely seems to trouble our cloistered political class. June 10th, 2026 | 35 comments
“When one your tribe is murdered, I call for calm and unity because that is according to your principles; when one of my tribe is murdered, I call for protests and riots because that is according to my principles.” – Alice Smith on the stark difference between reactions to the deaths of Henry Novak and George Floyd. She’s paraphrasing Frank Herbert. But tell me, there’s no “National White Police Association” in the UK, so why is there a “National Black Police Association” and a “National Association of Muslim Police” in the UK? June 3rd, 2026 | 37 comments
I’ve finally figured out why I find Wes Streeting so grating. It’s because he bigs up his working-class origins even as he shits all over working-class Britain. ‘I’m from Stepney’, he chirps, like a camp Dick van Dyke, before looking down his Cambridge-educated nose at his fellow oiks who voted for Brexit. He wears his humble roots like fancy dress to disguise his lofty indifference to the populist beliefs of those who don’t only come from working-class Britain but still live there. ‘I’m one of you’, he says, when every Brit with a brain knows he’s one of Them. May 16th, 2026 | 14 comments
A Regulating for Growth Bill – a slogan up there with copulating for virginity and drinking for sobriety… May 14th, 2026 | 26 comments
But the new military Keynesianism is based on a delusion. It refuses to confront the fact that defence spending is, in strictly economic terms, one of the very worst ways to promote broad industrial rejuvenation. The growth multipliers are weak and the long-term productivity gains are non-existent. Unlike, say, investment in large-scale capital projects, building things, creating new fixed assets in energy, transport or digital infrastructure, there’s little diffusion of defence spending through the wider economy. While the construction of new roads, power stations or tram networks might provide decades of cheaper inputs, rearmament has a severe opportunity cost. An arms factory might create demand for steel and provide jobs for workers in much the same way as a high-speed rail link — but the former produces few positive spillovers, while the latter can regenerate whole regions. Rather than building the lifeblood of work, jobs and economic activity for the next century, in short, this khaki-clad Keynesianism sacrifices domestic prosperity for a real or perceived threat from without, or else because of an illusory attachment to the idea of Britain as a “global player”. In truth, building and maintaining a world-class military exists downstream of a serious level of industrial capacity that Britain now sorely lacks. In the days of Bevin and Glubb, Britain built over half the world’s exported cars. Today it’s around 4%. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the UK was second only to the US in its steel production. Today, it manufactures less than Iran and Brazil, not enough to satisfy even half our own national demand. For all Labour’s rhetoric about a manufacturing renaissance, we simply don’t have the basic foundations of a durable industrial ecosystem: steel production; petrochemicals; plastics and advanced materials; energy independence and abundance; and a self-reliant productive base that isn’t subject to the whims of international oil shocks or geopolitical wrangling. – Jonny Ball writing What the Anglo-Gaullists get wrong May 10th, 2026 | 22 comments
It follows from this that digital ID could easily function as a permissions system. The computer might say No, leaving John unable to hire the car or buy the wine. That could be the result of an administrative error or technical glitch but, by the time the issue was resolved, John’s plans would have been cancelled. But it could also be due to the cancellation of his digital ID, a possibility the Government makes explicit in the consultation, explaining it would need the power to revoke someone’s digital ID. Speaking at the Parliamentary committee, insider-outsider Whitley said that the system envisaged for the right-to-work checks was one in which permissions for other activities, such as buying alcohol, could be switched off and on at will. April 28th, 2026 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve said before that the belief authoritarian politics is popular rests heavily on issue-based polling, filtered through a professional class reacting against the provincial, small-c conservatism of their childhood. This has causality backwards, the curtain-twitcher is mocked because busybody enforcement offends British social instinct. The nosy neighbour survives as a figure of comedy precisely because such behaviour is aberrant. British manners default to mind your own business: people do not discuss their salary, do not trumpet credentials, and do not boast, because doing so is considered gauche and intrusive. Most contemporary prohibitions (speech codes, licensing creep, online safety rules, public-health) are not therefore demanded by the masses banging pots and pans for more regulation. Reform UK has mostly avoided authoritarian posturing so far. Euroscepticism was inherently libertarian, which is why UKIP attracted voters who valued “boozy, defensive liberty.” Some worried Tory defectors might import paternalism, so it matters that Reform draws a clear line: there’s a difference between performative power-worship and simply expecting crime to be punished and public order maintained. Reform policymakers should recognise that this is a rare political window. Unpopular authoritarian measures are increasingly being associated in the public’s mind with Keir Starmer himself, and opportunities like that do not come along often. If there is ever a moment to argue for rolling back the frontiers of the state, whether on speed limits, smoking restrictions, firearms licensing, or freedom of speech, it is when public frustration and moral indignation are already doing half the work for you. April 22nd, 2026 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Offshore wind provides the bulk of electricity generation under the CfD scheme. Even with today’s elevated gas prices, the reference prices in March 2026 (£77/MWh) were much lower than the current strike prices of projects awarded contracts in AR6 (£88/MWh) and AR7 (£97/MWh). Onshore wind strike prices are slightly lower and those for solar much lower. But these projects produce trivial amounts of electricity compared to offshore wind, so we can expect subsidies to keep rising and bills to go ever higher. Labour’s announcement that it will scrap the Carbon Price Support mechanism in April 2028 is a welcome, if tardy, intervention that will reduce wholesale electricity prices and hence reference prices. However, this means that CfD-funded generators will simply collect more of their revenue from subsidies rather than the market. Conclusions Even with elevated gas prices, CfD subsidies are soaring and the outlook is that Miliband’s AR6 and AR7 auctions are going to send bills even higher. This has not stopped Ember putting out another shonky report that tortures the data to produce the result they want. It should be obvious, even to them, if subsidies are being paid to renewables then they are more expensive than gas. With this level of desperation from Ember, we really must be witnessing the dying embers of Net Zero propaganda. April 20th, 2026 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Unfortunately for anyone committed to sticking it out for the next few years, Labour seem to have all but abandoned hope of hanging on to lingering British dynamism. OpenAI recently announced that it would abandon its UK Stargate data centre plans, citing the exorbitant costs of energy and the maddening bureaucratic maze that stands in the way of building anything in Britain. While their competitor, Anthropic, seems open to Starmer’s suggestions to scale up its London presence, this has less to do with British competitiveness and more to do with the American Department of War’s combativeness. Meanwhile, Skycutter, a domestic drone manufacturer, can’t seem to get a callback, and may now have to painfully decamp to America just to keep flying. As their operations director, Vince Gardner told the BBC, “We want to stay here, this is our home, this is where we’ve developed this technology. We don’t want to leave but the opportunities [in the US] are too great to turn down currently.” It’s not entirely obvious why, despite promised government support, the opportunities for a drone manufacturer would be on the other side of the Atlantic from Ukraine, unless, as Gardner says, any promised support simply seems slower than moving an entire company out of the country. April 18th, 2026 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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