We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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“Dear Ed Sheeran, fence-sitting is so last century: musicians can no longer opt out of politics”, writes Zoe Williams in the Guardian.
Macklemore, both onstage and in his own statement, has rebuffed the argument that voicing support for Palestinians and criticising Israel and its actions in Gaza and the West Bank is antisemitic. (In 2014, he apologised for a costume he wore on stage, which critics said was antisemitic, saying: “I respect all cultures and all people.”)
So musicians “can’t” opt out of politics, but political opinion journalists opting out of either stating their own opinion as to whether Macklemore’s grotesque “Jewface” costume shown in this BBC article from 2014 might be a teensy-weensy bit anti-semitic, or of linking to a picture of it so that readers can decide for themselves, is just fine, apparently.
Macklemore should be free to throw Nazi salutes while prancing in his fake black beard and prosthetic hooked nose. He should be free to insult the general public’s intelligence and flatter his own public’s bigotry by saying with a smirk that he had no idea that anyone might think he was caricaturing a Jew. Zoe Williams should be free to pretend that she didn’t see the pictures in that BBC article despite having taken her “which critics said was antisemitic” line straight from it. And I’m free to say that for Zoe Williams, who was once longlisted for the Orwell Prize, to write an article demanding that Ed Sheeran take a side while averting her own eyes from blatant racism and concealing it from her readers makes her a worthy successor to Squealer.
97 of them were murdered by Muslim terrorists.
Here is a list of terrorist incidents in Great Britain this century, stating the ideology behind the attack, its date, the place it took place, the name usually given to the attack, and the number of victims killed.
Irish Republican – 09 September 2000 – MI6 HQ, London – MI6 rocket launcher attack – 0 killed.
Irish Republican – 04 March 2001 – BBC TV Centre – BBC TV Centre car bomb – 0 killed.
Irish Republican – 03 August 2001 – Ealing – Ealing car bomb – 0 killed.
Islamist – 07 July 2005 – London Transport system – 7/7 bombings – 52 killed.
Islamist – 21 July 2005 – London – 7/7 copycat bombs – 0 killed.
Other – 18 January 2007 – Various – Start of Miles Cooper letter bomb campaign – 0 killed.
Islamist – 30 June 2007 – Glasgow Airport – Glasgow airport attack – 0 killed.
Islamist – 14 May 2010 – East Ham – Stabbing of Stephen Timms MP – 0 killed.
Extreme Right – 29 April 2013 – Various – Start of Pavlo Lapshyn terrorism campaign – 1 killed.
Islamist – 22 May 2013 – Woolwich – Murder of Lee Rigby – 1 killed.
Irish Republican – 10 February 2014 – Various army recruitment offices – Start of New Irish Republican Army parcel bomb campaign – 0 killed.
Islamist – 18 February 2016 – Rochdale – Murder of Iman Jalal Uddin – 1 killed.
Extreme Right – 16 June 2016 – Birstall, West Yorkshire – Murder of Jo Cox MP – 1 killed.
Islamist – 22 March 2017 – Westminster Bridge, London – 2017 Westminster attack & murder of PC Keith Palmer – 5 killed.
Islamist – 22 May 2017 – Manchester Arena – Manchester Arena bombing – 22 killed.
Islamist – 03 June 2017 – London Bridge – 2017 London Bridge attack and Borough Market stabbings – 8 killed.
Extreme Right – 19 June 2017 – Finsbury Park, London – Finsbury Park attack – 1 killed.
Islamist – 15 June 2017 – Parsons Green, London – Parsons Green tube bombing – 0 killed.
Islamist – 14 August 2018 – Palace of Westminster – 2018 Westminster car attack – 0 killed.
Extreme Right – 16 March 2019 – Various – Vincent Fuller racist attacks – 0 killed.
Islamist – 29 November 2019 – London Bridge – 2019 London Bridge stabbings – 2 killed.
Islamist – 09 January 2020 – Whitemoor Prison, Cambridgeshire – Whitemoor prison stabbings – 0 killed.
Islamist – 02 February 2020 – Streatham, Lambeth, London – 2020 Streatham stabbing – 0 killed.
Islamist – 20 June 2020 – Forbury Gardens, Reading – 2020 Reading stabbings – 3 killed.
Islamist – 15 October 2021 – Liegh-on-Sea, Essex – Murder of David Amess MP – 1 killed.
Islamist – 14 November 2021 – Liverpool Women’s Hospital, Liverpool – Liverpool Women’s Hospital bombing – 0 killed.
Extreme Right – 30 October 2022 – Dover – Dover firebomb attack – 0 killed.
Extreme Right – 02 April 2024 – Hindlip, Worcestershire – Attack on asylum seeker at Hindlip – 0 killed.
Islamist – 02 October 2025 – Heaton Park Synagogue, Manchester – Manchester Synagogue attack – 2 killed.
Islamist – 31 December 2018 – Victoria Station, Manchester – Manchester Victoria station attack – 0 killed.
Islamist – 29 April 2026 – Golders Green Synagogue, London – Golders Green Synagogue attack – 0 killed.
The list was compiled from these Wikipedia pages:
List of terrorist incidents in Great Britain in the 2000s
List of terrorist incidents in Great Britain in the 2010s
List of terrorist incidents in Great Britain in the 2020s
I have excluded from the count the three young girls murdered in Southport by Axel Rudakubana because although he was charged under the Terrorism Act 2000 for possession of ricin and a military study of an Al-Qaeda training manual, I am not convinced his motive was political. I have also excluded the killing of Anne Widdecombe from the count because the suspect is awaiting trial and the presumption of innocence applies. If these two cases were included, the proportion of terrorist murders this century that were carried out by Muslims would be 97/104; 93% rather than 97%.
I do not blame innocent Muslims for the crimes of their co-religionists. I do not claim that all or most Muslims are terrorists. I honour those many Muslims who have fought against Islamic terrorism, at horrendous risk to themselves and their families. I do not deny that there are other sorts of terrorists out there, including those who seek to murder Muslims. But 97 out of 100 is a very high proportion.
“They can’t see why they are hated” wrote Seamus Milne two days after the 9/11 attacks.
Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don’t get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force – just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.
Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process – or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world – seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.
But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of “civilisation”, with its overtones of Samuel Huntington’s poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.
As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush’s father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel’s 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.
Gaza, eh? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Seamus Milne continued as a Guardian columnist for another fifteen years until he left to become Executive Director of Strategy and Communications for the Labour Party under its then-leader Jeremy Corbyn. In all that time I never once saw him recommend that Palestinians, or Muslims more generally, or anyone other than Westerners should ask themselves why they are hated.
“Ministers embraced the ‘world’s safest phone’. Then it unravelled” – an article by Georgina Quach in the Financial Times. She writes,
Rather than relying on apps to police harmful content, governments now want to intervene at the operating system level, so guardrails can get ahead of whichever app breaks on to the scene.
That is why Keir Starmer in June presented an ultimatum to tech companies: install child nudity-blocking software in devices by September or face legislation and fines.
And there is no excuse for dithering, the government’s announcement implied. It said this tech had already been achieved by the British company SafeToNet. Ministers held up SafeToNet as proof point for the proposition that child safety can be built into phones universally and block nudity in real time.
But what appeared to the government to be an “oven-ready” fix is now running into difficulty, after the first smartphone to integrate SafeToNet technology was removed from sale following an investigation into the device’s safety risks. The HMD Fuse, sold by Vodafone, was launched last year as the “first smartphone that protects a child’s innocence by stopping nude content from being filmed, seen, shared and stored”. In January of this year, former ministers Peter Kyle and Jess Phillips starred in a video promoting the phone. Six months later, sales have been suspended.
Why? The answer is alarming:
Then, in July 2026, Moore discovered what he described as a different, serious flaw: an unauthorised person could potentially register as the guardian of another child’s handset and access its live location. According to Moore, the problem was that the pairing relied on the IMEI number, the unique serial code that identifies each handset. He said this number was predictable: part of the number was fixed and the rest could be systematically enumerated and plugged in. He said that meant he could “become the guardian of every child on the platform, which meant I basically had a live map of every child on the system at the time”.
The Telegraph has picked up an interesting story from the Los Angeles Times: “Polling putting Democratic Socialist in the lead was fake, admits firm”
Polling that projected a Democratic Socialist candidate had a commanding lead over her main rival was fake.
Progressive Francesca Hong was seen as a front-runner in the primary to be the Democratic nominee for Wisconsin governor, but went on to lose.
Median Strategies, which billed itself as a trustworthy, non-partisan polling company, projected that Ms Hong had a more than 20-point lead over moderate David Crowley.
However, on Aug 11, she narrowly lost to Mr Crowley, handing establishment Democrats a win following a wave of victories by Left-wing candidates.
Median Strategies has now admitted the polling data were faked and part of a “short-term social experiment”, following a report by The Los Angeles Times.
Note that, although in that primary Median Strategies falsely raised the hopes of the extreme Left, in another contest the company put out fake polling that exaggerated the lead of the establishment Democrat over the extreme leftist:
The company had also released incorrect data showing Karen Bass, the mayor of LA, had a double-digit lead over Nithya Raman, a city council member and Democratic Socialist, before the mayoral run-off in November.
I don’t know quite what to think of this. The Telegraph commenters, few of whom appear have read as far as the part about Bass vs Raman, think that this proves their long-held suspicion that all polls are lies put out by left wingers to artificially boost support for left wing ideas. This suspicion is not true. Polls are frequently wrong, they are sometimes skewed by the political biases of the people who set the questions and interpret the answers, but they are not generally made up. Reputable polling companies like YouGov and Ipsos scarcely make any profit from their political polls; their real business is market research. They do the voting intention polls to demonstrate their honesty, and to show that opinion polls can tease out meaningful information from the background noise. And I hate to say it, but millions upon millions of people truly support left wing ideas because it would be so nice if you really could make people rich and safe and good by decree.
Getting back to Median Strategies, I see that the US media fell for the hoax. For once, I do not blame them. It was a genuinely interesting experiment but it destroys trust. Perhaps that is a good thing in a world full of increasingly sophisticated lies, but, somehow, this obscure story about some fake polls in a foreign country disturbed me more than one would expect.
Our new Prime Minister is taking action to protect British people against unfair dealing.
“It should be just as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to start it. And if something is advertised as half price, it should actually be half price”, he says. Sounds fair.
Darren Jones is stuck paying for some subscriptions that he doesn’t use or want and has asked for Mr Burnham’s help:
And on the scourge of fake price reductions, Anna Ridgway asks,
When I was a teacher, many years ago, the Times Higher Education Supplement was on every staffroom table and was considered the voice of the progressive establishment. Perhaps I should not be surprised to see its modern incarnation, Times Higher Education, receive the sort of treatment that was once reserved for the tabloids when they got too nosey about people in power. Progressivism always has the progressivism of a generation ago among its prime targets. Jack Grove of Times Higher Education writes, “I was reported to police over Arday case. I was just doing my job”:
[…] I decided, on second thoughts, to take the voicemail at my desk, about 10 minutes away in Holborn.
I was shocked to hear it was from the Metropolitan Police, asking me to call them back. Why? Nothing remarkable had happened to me in the previous year. When I rang back the officer explained a complaint had been made against me regarding the University of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, but the matter was now closed.
But it was important, the officer explained, that I didn’t contact him again, because it was affecting his mental health.
However, I hadn’t emailed Arday in four months – my last direct email had been in September, offering formal right of reply to allegations that he had plagiarised his PhD.
That allegation was not made lightly: I had assembled a 63-page report which detailed how he had apparently used, without proper citation, huge chunks from a thesis written in 2009 by another student, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, now a highly respected education academic at Brunel University of London. Further checks found passages that seemed to be lifted from the work of researchers based in the US, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere in the UK. In total, I submitted 97 pages of evidence to both Cambridge and Arday’s awarding institution, Liverpool John Moores University, for their investigation.
Serious allegations, certainly. Deeply embarrassing and distressing, definitely. Although Arday was eventually cleared of plagiarism by an LJMU review, a frenzy of coverage led to Cambridge opening an investigation into Arday’s academic record and CV, followed shortly afterwards by Arday announcing his resignation.
But were my inquiries grounds for a criminal complaint? That was hugely troubling to me as a reporter who specialises in examining issues of research integrity and ethics.
“Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor”, writes the Guardian’s Lanre Bakare.
Bakare has made strenuous efforts to be fair to Arday, but, alongside the extensive evidence of plagiarism and the extreme physical unlikelihood of Arday’s claim to to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, ten of those days with a hairline fracture in his leg, the pattern of behaviour Bakare describes below is difficult to explain away:
In an open letter to the government minister Jacqui Smith in July 2025, which outlined Arday’s experiences, he claimed to have been “threatened with a knife, physically assaulted and spat on; [had] rape and death threats being made to him and his family; bananas and bullets being posted to him via the university campus; and corrosive substances and mutilated animals sent to his family home”.
In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Arday claimed to have been confronted at his faculty building on two separate occasions by a masked man threatening to harm him if he did not resign, and evading detection both times. On the second occasion Arday said the intruder produced a knife and threatened him with it.
The Guardian understands that after Arday reported the first intrusion to the university, enhanced CCTV was placed in the faculty and a panic alarm was installed in his office. The professor said he hit the panic alarm during the second confrontation, but that no one responded. It should have triggered an alarm alerting the faculty’s security team, all of whom were present at the time of the alleged incident.
The intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Arday did not report either intrusion at the time, telling the Guardian that after the second incident he continued his working day and even conducted a PhD viva for a student less than two hours later.
He did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.
and
Arday confirmed in an interview with the Guardian that the “mutilated animals sent to his family home” mentioned in the open letter was a severed pig’s head, delivered in a large cardboard box to his parents’ home address in south London. He claimed to have intercepted the package and immediately thrown it away, only telling the police several months later.
In a subsequent interview he claimed the police investigated, checking with butchers in south London if they had sold a pig, eventually finding one that had sold a “whole hog” on the morning the head was left outside the family home.
When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said “that’s the kind of thing we’d remember”.
When the details Arday gave about the pig’s head investigation were checked by London’s Metropolitan police, the Guardian was told they were “categorically” incorrect and no investigation had taken place.
He’s going down, and the only remaining question is which of his gullible academic sponsors he will drag down with him.
In the Telegraph today:
The messages that show Covid scientists secretly suspected a lab leak
Scientists who were instrumental in shutting down the Covid lab-leak theory admitted in private “we can’t rule it out”, newly released messages show.
In March 2020, a group of influential virologists published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine arguing that an animal spillover event probably caused the pandemic.
The article, known as “The Proximal Origins of Covid” [Link to the paper here. In fact its title refers to “Origin” in the singular- NS] concluded “we do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” and was hugely persuasive in stifling debate globally.
But messages obtained and published by US senator Rand Paul show that behind the scenes the scientists voiced concerns that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had been carrying out experiments on coronaviruses at insufficient biosecurity levels.
The virus emerged eight miles from WIV laboratories and was seemingly pre-adapted to infect humans
and
The messages also reveal that authors were aware that Dr Shi – the lead bat virus scientist at WIV – was herself worried that Covid had been caused by a lab accident.
In September 2021, it emerged that before the pandemic Dr Shi had applied for a grant to insert a furin cleavage site (FCS) into bat coronaviruses – the very addition that made Covid-19 so infectious to humans.
Although the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency dismissed the grant because it was too dangerous, Slack messages showed that scientists feared the work had gone ahead anyway.
Prof Andrew Rambaut of Edinburgh University wrote that “it isn’t beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff”, adding, “We just need to re-convince ourself it is coincidence.”
You may be saying, “I’ve read Viral. This is not news to me”. The news is that it is being reported in a major “quality” British newspaper.
Here is what the Telegraph was saying about the “Proximal Origin” paper on 1st May 2020:
The study that proves conspiracy theorists wrong – coronavirus came from nature
Covid-19 is not a “laboratory construct” but emerged as a result of natural evolution, according to a report which demolishes conspiracy theories about the origins of the disease.
The virus first emerged in Wuhan, China, at the end of December and has since spread rapidly across the globe, with more than three million people worldwide now infected.
But fear and misinformation have escalated alongside the pandemic, with the World Health Organization warning that the globe is fighting an “infodemic” as well as an epidemic.
One common myth has been that the new virus, called SARS-CoV-2, was originally made in a laboratory. But in a study, published in Nature Medicine journal, researchers analysed the genome sequence of the coronavirus and found strong evidence it evolved naturally, probably from a bat or a pangolin.
Sarah Newey has more details on the evidence that debunks President Trump’s latest theory.
Nice touch in linking the thing you don’t want people to take seriously to Trump, though that trick no longer works as well as it once did.
There is no shame in having been wrong, so long as you then work sincerely to put things right. In today’s article the Telegraph goes some way to atone for its past errors. Let’s see how the rest of the British media covers this story. Let’s see if the rest of the British media covers this story.
“Burnham to scrap Starmer’s digital ID scheme in ‘reset of priorities’”, the Guardian reports.
Andy Burnham is expected to scrap Keir Starmer’s plans for digital ID cards in a “reset of priorities” when he enters Downing Street on Monday.
The new Labour leader plans to redirect the resources earmarked for the scheme towards tackling the cost of living, his team indicated on Saturday.
The Guardian understands the proposals are being outlined in an attempt to distance the incoming prime minister from unpopular choices made by his predecessor. A petition opposing the introduction of digital ID cards when it was announced last year attracted about 3m signatures.
Well done to all who signed it.
“One of the first things this government will do is put its focus where people need it right now: creating breathing space and delivering change they can feel in their everyday lives,” Burnham’s spokesperson said.
“That means all the time and resource that was going to be spent on a national ID scheme will go instead to where it’s most needed, such as helping with the cost of living.
Although the cost of the scheme would have been great (projected to be 1.8 billion pounds and we all know it would have gone astronomically over budget), the foolish things Mr Burnham will do with the money saved, such as free bus travel for 11-16 year olds according to the Telegraph, will add to inflation, making the cost of living higher.
But the money scarcely matters. The important thing is that this series of Yookay ends with Starmer’s monster being chased away. It’ll come back, it always does. Some of those old Blair episodes were right scary before they announced “Giant ID computer plan scrapped”. But for now, let the credits roll and make yourself a cup of tea.
“Speaking ill of the dead is not an offence, however offensive. If Heather Herbert joins the @SpeechUnion, we will do our best to help.”
I consider my membership dues well spent.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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