For Farage and Reform, Musk’s attack is sunlight, the best disinfectant. It clarifies the divide: Reform as a broad church for disillusioned patriots, not a niche for extremists.
– Gawain Towler (£)
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August 28th, 2025 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
 These are not smart taxes in a service economy that desperately needs to increase productivity. We need a tax policy that encourages people to work longer hours, in the highest-paying, private sector jobs they can find. We need a tax policy that encourages money to move from unproductive assets to more productive investments, which hopefully make a profit and pay dividends. We need a tax policy that enables small and medium-sized businesses to continue to operate, employ people and pay taxes. We need a tax policy that encourages the global wealthy to live in the UK and spend their money here. Worst still, besides risking the bulk of UK taxes by discouraging businesses and driving the rich out of the country, these tax increases still aren’t enough to pay for the Government’s additional spending. Which brings us back to the opening paragraph of this essay: A doom loop occurs when government policy reduces economic activity by over-taxing it, over-regulating it, or allowing unconnected third parties to stifle it with litigation. Lower economic activity lowers tax revenue, which in turn causes a debt spiral if the government can’t or won’t cut spending, which leads to increased debt and higher debt costs. In the 2024/25 financial year, the UK public sector net debt was £2.8 trillion, equivalent to 95.1% of GDP. Public sector net borrowing was £151.9 billion in 2024/25, £20.7 billion higher than the previous year and equal to 5.3% of GDP, up from 4.8% in the financial year 2023/24. August 27th, 2025 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
What began as scattered acts of defiance has blossomed into a nationwide movement: St George’s Crosses and Union Jacks hoisted on lampposts, motorway bridges, and public spaces from Birmingham’s Shard End to Tower Hamlets in east London, Southampton to Brighton, and even Cannock. Roundabouts painted red and white, zebra crossings marked with the cross, symbols of England asserting themselves in the urban landscape. Last night I cycled through London’s Labour stronghold of Lambeth, and road markings have been transformed with the St George’s Cross, a quiet but bold reclamation in one of London’s most diverse boroughs. Dubbed “Operation Raise the Colours” by organisers (though it is hard to describe the phenomenon as organised), it has seen thousands of flags raised, with fundraising efforts like Birmingham’s £16,000 drive sustaining the effort. I support this gentle uprising, for it breathes life into symbols long marginalised. August 25th, 2025 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
Thousands upon thousands of ULEZ cameras have been destroyed by the Bladerunners (way more than 5,000 last year alone)
August 24th, 2025 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is interesting.
Hopefully more sites and services outside the UK will refuse to comply with the appalling Online Safety Act. August 18th, 2025 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
A trade group representing companies that build age verification systems is now lobbying to extend these checks to anyone using a VPN in the UK. The Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) wants online platforms that fall under the UK’s censorship law, the Online Safety Act, to not only detect VPN usage but also analyze user behavior to guess whether someone might be a minor in disguise. If flagged, users would face a prompt: prove your age, or allow a one-time geolocation to confirm you’re outside the UK. According to the AVPA, this process is necessary because VPNs can mask users’ actual locations, allowing them to appear as though they are in countries where age verification laws do not apply. The association points to data showing a dramatic increase in VPN use around the time the UK’s new internet rules were enforced, suggesting people are using these tools to bypass restrictions. This approach treats privacy tools as a form of defiance. Here, VPNs, once considered sensible and essential for online security, are being rebranded as suspicious. August 17th, 2025 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
August 15th, 2025 | 108 comments - (Comments are closed)
August 13th, 2025 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
These two things were separate items in the Spectator newsletter.
… and…
But of course these are not separate at all. This only ends if the UK gets a factory reset, a literal non-figurative revolution. I really hope we can vote our way out of this, but with the rise of sectarian politics inexorably turning the UK into something akin to Ulster writ large, I am by no means confident that is going to be the case. If so, I wonder what will kick off the 1642 moment? What will the sides even be? August 6th, 2025 | 53 comments - (Comments are closed)
It comes after Mrs Badenoch wrote in The Telegraph that Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were making “even bigger mistakes” than Ms Truss and had not learnt the lessons of her mini-budget. Responding, Ms Truss says: “It is disappointing that instead of serious thinking like this, Kemi Badenoch is instead repeating spurious narratives. I suspect she is doing this to divert from the real failures of 14 years of Conservative government in which her supporters are particularly implicated. It was a fatal mistake not to repeal Labour legislation like the Human Rights Act because the modernisers wanted to be the ‘heirs to Blair’. Huge damage was done to our liberties through draconian lockdowns and enforcement championed by Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings.” – Liz Truss as quoted in an article by Daniel Martin (£) August 5th, 2025 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
My drug of choice, however, is X—though using it doesn’t really feel like much of a choice. I’m the editor of a daily politics-focused newsletter, where my duty is to provide readers with a more or less comprehensive digest of everything they need to know from the day’s news. On a normal day, the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is check X. The last thing I do before going to bed is check X. I browse X while I sip my morning coffee. Throughout the day, I take breaks from writing to see if anything new has hit X that I might need to incorporate into my writing. After I’m done for the day, I keep monitoring X throughout the evening to get ahead of the next day’s stories. When I try to ignore X and source my writing from the “mainstream” press, I inevitably find that The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal has omitted some critical piece of context without which it is impossible to truly understand the story. If I take too much time away from X—on weekends, for instance—I inevitably find I lose the thread of the news, and have to work doubly hard on Monday to catch up. – Park MacDougald (£) in an article about actual drugs of the performance enhancing kind. August 3rd, 2025 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
August 1st, 2025 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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