For a couple of decades now I’ve been insisting that China is the most free market economy on the planet. In some senses of course this is laughably untrue. In others, or in at least one, remarkably close to the bone.
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December 18th, 2025 | 8 comments
 Britain is like an alcoholic who has spent a decade reassuring himself that, despite his binges and blackouts, he is “high functioning”. The reality is, however, that he is increasingly not actually functioning at all. We are headed for the rock bottom we so badly need. The moment of clarity is coming. It will be painful. But it’s the only thing that can save this country. – Konstantin Kisin (£) December 16th, 2025 | 38 comments
There has been no accountability for the first round of mask mandates. No apologies. No acknowledgment that millions of people were coerced into wearing ineffective face coverings based on assumptions, hope, and political pressure rather than evidence. And now, emboldened by that lack of consequences, the same voices are back demanding we do it all again. December 14th, 2025 | 27 comments
There is strategic competition with economic rivals, notably China, especially around advanced technology, supply-chain dominance, and industrial sovereignty. But tariffs raise costs for domestic firms that rely on imported components, in some cases hurting US manufacturers rather than helping them. Indeed, recent data show US manufacturing has contracted, with some firms citing tariffs as a reason for layoffs or relocation. Retaliation from trade partners can offset gains via higher tariffs abroad, disrupted supply chains, and increased uncertainty. The welfare benefits of rising domestic output are modest under many models because gains might be outweighed by efficiency losses, higher consumer prices, and reduced variety. And the government risks politicizing trade decisions, which may lead to cronyism or poorly targeted protection by helping politically connected sectors rather than broadly boosting national economic health December 10th, 2025 | 52 comments
The postponement of elections has always been an echo of contemporary catastrophe, as one the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rides roughshod over the land. War, Pestilence, these were the grim riders that justified such extraordinary measures, halting the democratic process only when the very survival of the nation hung in the balance. But now, in 2025, we witness the emergence of a fifth horseman, one more insidious and mundane: Tyranny, or perhaps better named, Bureaucracy. Cloaked in the guise of administrative reform and devolution, this ethereally dull and shadowy figure has been unleashed by the Labour government, in collusion with Conservative councils, to trample upon the democratic rights of millions. December 7th, 2025 | 8 comments
That is not how wealth works of course. The people who have piles of money do not in fact have piles of money they’ve got piles of paper signifying ownership of companies and businesses. Which leads to the third problem with the idea. Which is that taxing these billionaires on their stacks of ownership of assets does not, in fact, free up money into the economy. It doesn’t reverse hoarding that is – just changes who hoards. December 5th, 2025 | 18 comments
What Putin understands – and what Britain refuses to face – is that Europe is vulnerable in ways that matter more than tanks or troop numbers. Russia’s president does not need to defeat Nato militarily to cause chaos. As he has already shown through repeated greyzone attacks, Europe’s power grids, subsea cables, energy systems and communications networks offer targets far easier to strike, far harder to defend and politically far more disruptive. Putin’s warning this week was a reminder that Russia knows exactly where our exposed nerves lie. – Sam Olsen (£) December 4th, 2025 | 26 comments
‘The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage’, Andrew Marr informed the Independent in 2008. ‘It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don’t have access to politicians, who don’t have easy access to official documents, who aren’t able to buttonhole people in power.’ At the Cheltenham Literary Festival two years later, he was dismissing these online upstarts as ‘socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people.’ And there’s more: ‘So-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.’ But the media world is changing. In the US, major networks are looking to online media for a lead as ratings for legacy media decline. CBS has enlisted Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, a few short years after she was bullied out of the New York Times before she slowly built up a multi-million dollar online empire with the Free Press. Some BBC stalwarts have, like Marr, perhaps seen where things are heading, and jumped ship to be free to express their old ideas on new media. Emily Maitlis and John Sopel created the News Agents podcast for this purpose. Oxbridge-educated Maitlis now doubles down on the smug but deluded sense of class-based superiority that has become her stock-in-trade. Never has she seemed more out of place as when she deigned to take her podcast to Clacton on the eve of the General Election last year. Nigel Farage is now Clacton’s MP. – Michael Collins with an absolutely stonking article on Spiked December 1st, 2025 | 22 comments
I strongly recommend this article by Gawain Towler about the unedifying case of traitor Nathan Gill. November 25th, 2025 | 13 comments
Cash savings are not dead money – they’re the deposits that finance the banks’ loan books. Tossery built upon ignorance. Richard Murphy – that Sage of Ely – is one of the few people in the country able to proffer up budget ideas even worse than the ones we’re going to get from Rachel this week. November 24th, 2025 | 11 comments
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. November 22nd, 2025 | 12 comments
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