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.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Fewer Britons giving to charity, study says, with donations down by £1.4bn, reports the Guardian.
The article gives cost of living pressure as the main reason for the decline in giving. Commenters in this thread on the UKPolitics subreddit also mention invasive chuggers and the fact people tend not to have cash on them these days.
The article itself continues,
Peter Grant, an expert in philanthropy at Bayes Business School, said the decline in giving also reflected a more polarised society. “Culture war” attacks mounted by rightwing politicians and media on voluntary organisations such as RNLI and the National Trust had undermined the wider legitimacy of charities among some donors.
Maybe, but far from being the victims of “attacks mounted by rightwing politicians and media”, a lot of charities seem to have been eager to volunteer for the front lines of the culture wars.
This excerpt comes from the section of the website of Oxfam International headed “What We Do”:
3. Center decolonial and feminist practice in our organization
Decolonization is intrinsic to achieving gender justice for all. Our sector comes from an extractive colonial history – hetero-patriarchal and racist in nature. Neocolonial dynamics continue to shape our sector’s work and approaches. We will evolve into an organization that centers decolonial and feminist practice by building on our principles and initiatives to deeply integrate them into every aspect of our work.
There speaks a soldier of the culture wars. How long did they expect to keep waving their banners without anyone noticing that they had picked a side?
I believe that Oxfam does still occasionally do the “help suffering people in emergencies” thing that most of those who buy from or volunteer to work in their charity shops think is their main purpose. That’s my excuse for buying that nice scarf I saw in their window the other day, anyway. But I wonder what proportion of what I paid for that scarf went to pay the salaries of the sort of people who write “hetero-patriarchal” with a straight face. And writing guff about “neocolonial dynamics” is actually one of the less bad things some of Oxfam’s paid staff have got up to over the last few years, as can be seen by reading some of the many previous Samizdata posts about Oxfam at this link.
Added later: Here is another example of Oxfam’s enthusiastic participation in the culture wars:
JK Rowling: Oxfam sorry for video after ‘cartoon JK Rowling’ accusation.
Oxfam has apologised after posting an animation for Pride Month featuring a character in a “hate group” who some say resembles author JK Rowling.
The charity has denied the cartoon woman with red eyes and a “Terf” badge is based on the Harry Potter writer.
In trying to make a point about “the real harm caused by transphobia”, Oxfam said it had “made a mistake”.
Compare the pictures in that BBC article and see if you believe Oxfam when it said that “There was no intention by Oxfam or the film-makers for this slide to have portrayed any particular person or people.” I do not. In the Telegraph’s account of the same story, the resemblance is even clearer. Some smart work by the Telegraph’s picture editor has almost certainly found the very photograph of Ms Rowling which Oxfam’s cartoonist had in front of them when they drew the middle witch.
That’s taking a side. I have read several comments by people who are on the same side who acknowledge and deplore this. When you alienate half the population, don’t be surprised when they stop giving you money.
This letter appeared in today’s Guardian:
What needs to be spelled out to the politicians looking to consult people about digital ID is that you cannot have a universal digital anything until you have universal phone coverage (UK digital ID scheme to have limited use before next general election, minister says, 10 March). When the old copper phone lines are switched off, we will be cut off because no provider will invest in our area, and this is not untypical of large areas of Devon.
That means that any digital ID accessed by phone will not be available to us unless we go and park in a layby every day where we can get signal. Does Darren Jones, the prime minister’s chief secretary, even understand this point? We are not refuseniks. We just live near a hill, and so we won’t be able to do our car tax, get our medical records or anything else as things stand.
This is not a lifestyle choice either because we had a properly functioning analog TV signal as well as a landline when we moved here. We can’t give out our mobile number to anybody important because we know that the device will let us down, and we are paying the same as everyone else – have been for years.
Teresa Rodrigues
Crediton, Devon
This is a good argument against digital ID in itself and is also likely to work well in the public sphere. I welcome any blow against digital ID, and I sympathise with Ms Rodrigues, but I must acknowledge that there is a problem for libertarians here.
As the letter says, the UK’s old Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) landline phone network is in the process of being replaced. This link takes you to the government guidance page on “Moving landlines to digital technologies”. The government and the phone companies present this transition to “Digital Voice” as being un upgrade for which we should be grateful. It is not an upgrade for me and I am not grateful. Compared to some, I am not badly affected, but I have lost the convenient ability to dial six digits instead of eleven for a local number, and, more worryingly, Digital Effing Voice doesn’t work when there is a power cut, which we have fairly often. For those who live in rural areas, such as the writer of the above letter, it will be much worse. A friend of mine lives in Scotland, has very poor mobile signal at the best of times, and regularly experiences days-long power cuts due to snow. That’ll be fun when the landline doesn’t work. Next year’s papers will be full of stories about old people in isolated houses who died because they could not call for help in an emergency. This change is not being done for the benefit of the customers. It is being done because the “new digital technologies using the internet such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Digital Voice or All-IP telephony” cost less to run than the old technologies.
What to do? If I was a socialist or a big-state Conservative, I would immediately say that the old copper phone lines must be maintained despite the expense in order to protect the vulnerable and to keep the system working in the face of attack or disaster. As a minarchist, I might be able to say the same, but given that the actual socialists in power and the big-state Conservatives who preceded them have not taken that route, when I have no doubt that they would have been happy to trumpet that they were doing so, I would guess that the extra expense of maintaining the old system must be insupportable.
Or am I wrong?
The Daily Mail features this story about a pro-Palestinian activist:
Thomas Bourne, 39, an Islamic convert who uses the social media handle ‘White British Muslim’, approached the Jewish comedian, 51, last month after spotting him on an escalator.
He said: ‘I was going up the escalator and looked to my side and saw someone giving me an uncomfortable even hostile look and I realised it was Matt Lucas.
‘My instant reaction – as anyone’s would be who was going to confront someone – was to pull out my camera phone and shout “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!”
‘As a result of that video and a subsequent Daily Mail article I actually lost my job.’
As commenter “MoleUK” says on the UKPolitics subreddit,
Sounds like a totally normal thing a normal person would do. Normally.
Bellend acts like a bellend and suffers repurcussions.
Every personal interaction a chance to show one’s virtues, just gotta make sure it’s captured on camera and uploaded to social media immediately. What a miserable way to live.
The interview with Mr Bourne at the PoliticsJOE podcast, from which the Mail took the story, can be seen here. The section quoted by the Mail is excerpted right at the beginning, and the video Mr Bourne himself made is shown at 8:07 and can be seen here. The interviewer, Seán Hickey, sympathetically introduces Mr Bourne with the words, “We’re going to be talking today about an incident that you found yourself involved in” as if Mr Bourne had no choice about initially accosting Matt Lucas, filming him while shouting “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!”, confronting him further at the top of the escalator (while making a point of loudly repeating his name so everyone would know it was someone famous), continuing to follow him and argue with him despite Lucas’s non-confrontational answers, and then putting the resulting video on social media.
I do not know if London Transport has any rules against shouting at strangers you think are looking at you funny, filming them, and putting the video on social media without their consent. If it does have such rules, they were not enforced on this occasion. Mr Bourne was not punished by London Transport. Nor was he punished by the law. This is not a free speech issue. The only bad result he suffered was that his employer no longer wished to have him on their roster of fundraising consultants. I can see why Mr Bourne might not be an asset for an organisation trying to raise funds.
Ill fares the land. Ominous tidings abound, such as MPs giving ministers powers to restrict the entire internet, World War III breaking out, and Winston Churchill being replaced by a badger.
But who could fail to feel hope stir in their bosom when the headline “Zack Polanski repeated claim hypnosis can increase breast size, BBC interview reveals” is a serious and genuinely consequential piece of political news?
Polanski the politician can be judged by the fact that he wants to arrest the president of Israel and build a relationship with Vladimir Putin. It becomes ever-clearer that before Polanski was a charlatan in politics he was simply a charlatan. But I am not convinced that his claim to have inflated women’s breasts by mesmerism is truly culpable. He seems to have half-believed it himself, alongside a more plausible theory that what he was actually doing was increasing the women’s self-confidence. There do not seem to have been many complaints from his customers. At some level I expect they understood that what they were buying from him was an hour with someone who would listen to them and then say soothing words. He should have stuck with his previous, more honourable profession. “With my help you can wish your boobs bigger” is less of a lie than “This time, rent control will work”.
Maybe I imagined it.
I thought I saw the first few seconds of a scary video, either put out by the Home Office “Prevent” scheme or by some NGO with a similar remit. The video featured a teenage actor – white and male, obviously – portraying a boy lamenting that he had got a criminal record after impulsively posting hate speech online. I remembered the title as being something like “It just takes a few seconds to get a criminal record” or “It only takes a few words to get a criminal record”. From what little I saw of it, the video seemed more sinister than 99% of the hate speech it aimed to combat – because it was not put out by some Twitter-addled rando with thirteen followers but by His Majesty’s government, or an organisation closely associated with the same.
Ya know how it is. I just saw a second or two and thought, “I might blog about that”, but I was too busy to note it down. And now it’s disappeared. I put a query into CoPilot, which might have been unwise, and got this:
🔗 Official Home Office Video Link
🎥 “It Just Takes a Few Words to Get a Criminal Record” — UK Government (Prevent)
YouTube (Official UK Government Channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8hE1G9FqJw (youtube.com in Bing)
This is the authentic version of the video you’re looking for. It’s produced as part of the UK Government’s counter extremism and online safety messaging aimed at young people.
📌 What this video covers
• Warns young people that posting extremist or hateful content online can lead to:
o Arrest
o Prosecution
o A criminal record
• Uses a serious, cautionary tone
• Shows teen actors in realistic online scenarios
• Designed to discourage impulsive posting of harmful content
The link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8hE1G9FqJw says “This video isn’t available anymore”
That “anymore” suggests it did once exist, but I am beginning to wonder if I did not hallucinate the whole thing and spur the A.I. to join in my hallucination by means of my prompts.
Assuming I did not imagine it, can I get this video back from the void? I’ve tried the Wayback Machine without success.
UPDATE: That was quick. My thanks to commenter nbc who said, “This one?”
Yes. This one.
https://xcancel.com/Steve_Laws_/status/2029317472059359438
It took me about a second of scrolling down from that post to find views expressed by Steve Laws that I strongly disagreed with. For instance, he mocks Laurence Fox for saying, in the context of the child-killer Ian Huntley being attacked and killed by another prisoner, that even the most depraved criminals should be protected from vigilante justice in prison. Steve Laws appears to be an actual far-right person. They do exist. But as I have said before, “if there is a truth respectable people shy away from mentioning, do not be surprised when the despicable people who will say it aloud are listened to.”
The video appears to have been put out by the police rather than the Home Office, and shows a boy – not “a boy” in the sense of “a young man”; a child of about thirteen – tearfully saying “I just got all my devices taken away by the police. My mum couldn’t believe it. I might get a criminal record and not be able to go to college. I only shared a link. I just thought it was funny. But it was terrorist content, and that is not a game, it’s real life.”
That is a deeply sinister message for the police to be putting out, particularly in that it is aimed at children.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Ted Schuerzinger has provided a direct link to the video: https://www.instagram.com/terrorismpolice/reel/DVd1g1bkg7I/. It came from an Instagram account called “terrorismpolice”. The final frame shows a police logo and the words:
COUNTER TERRORISM POLICING
A.C.T.|ACTION COUNTERS TERRORISM
WHAT YOU SHARE LEAVES A TRACE
CLICK TO FIND OUT MORE
and the caption to the Instagram video says,
Has your child spotted our latest campaign on their feed? 👀
We’ve launched a digital campaign aimed at teenage boys to highlight the real-world consequences of sharing harmful extremist content online.
The content is being promoted on platforms young people already use, to reach them where they are.
Our message is simple: sharing extremist material can lead to serious legal and life-changing consequences.
It’s not just a laugh. What you share leaves a trace.
Learn more about the campaign and the message behind it via the link in our story.
Two questions occur to me:
1) Why was the video removed from YouTube? Hostile comments?
2) Is the video an accurate portrayal of the likely “real-world consequences of sharing harmful extremist content online” when the sharer is a child and the content is something the child shares because they think it is funny? If it is not an accurate portrayal, then the police officers or police employees who made the video are deliberately frightening children with misinformation regarding the law. People have had the police turn up at their doors to issue a “friendly warning” for less. If, however, it is an accurate portrayal of the real world – that is, if children really are being given criminal records for sharing (not creating, sharing) comic memes of whose extremist origin they were unaware, then we are further along than even I thought.
Dean Conway has written a supportive article for Central Bylines about the Green Party’s eye-catching new housing policy:
Green Party policy ‘Abolish Landlords’: solving the housing crisis
The Green Party’s ‘Abolish Landlords’ policy could end the housing crisis with a number of measures that will benefit tenants
“The Private Rental Sector has failed”, reads the Green Party’s statement to ‘Abolish Landlords’ motion, adopted as party policy at October’s Green Party Conference. Key elements of its plan to tackle the UK’s endemic housing crisis include:
Abolishing Right-to-Buy legislation and introducing Rent Controls.
Levying more taxes on landlords, including Land Value taxes and national insurance on rental income.
Ending Buy-to-Let mortgages.
Subsidising councils to buy back properties that have not been insulated to EPC rating C or have been vacant for more than six months.
Speaking to Alex Mace by email, Worcester City’s Green Party councillor and co-sponsor of the motion, he told me that ‘Abolish Landlords’ “takes actual concrete steps to solve the housing crisis that are largely how our original stock of council homes were built through the 50s, 60s and 70s”, including establishing “a state-owned housing manufacturer … to deliver housing at scale”. While the motion does not actually outlaw landlordism, it “seeks to make it significantly less attractive to be a private landlord”.
I’m getting a “defund the police” vibe. Tell the base that the slogan means exactly what it says, while telling the rubes that it doesn’t, with scope to row back on either position when convenient.
By the way, here is the Greens’ policy on migration, as stated on their website:
The Green Party in government will:
Implement a fair and humane system of managed immigration
Treat all migrants as if they are citizens
Give all residents the right to vote
Help families to be together
Dismantle the Home Office
Abolish the No Recourse to Public Funds condition
Abolish the ten year route to settlement
Stop the profiteering from application fees
Stop putting people in prison because of their immigration status
Accept our responsibility for the climate emergency and support the people forced to move
That policy would increase the need for rented housing rather a lot.
Taylor Lorenz is the one who doxxed Libs of TikTok, who came this close to lionising the murderer Luigi Mangione, and who for some reason habitually lies about her age, but she makes some excellent points in this article: “The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all”.
Excerpt:
While social media bans may seem like a prudent measure to protect children, they are not only ineffective, they endanger both children and adults. There is little evidence that social media is driving any type of widespread mental health crisis in children. Studies have repeatedly shown the opposite. Removing anonymity from the web, which will inevitably happen when tech companies are required to identify and ban children, allows for easier government tracking and censorship of journalists, activists and whistleblowers, who rely on online anonymity.
And while some claim the laws would curb big tech’s power, only the largest tech companies have the resources to shoulder the extensive costs of age verification systems. Non-profit and indie platforms could be forced to close, consolidating big tech’s power further. Mass surveillance systems, once constructed, could also be easily leveraged by governments and bad actors.
If we want to fix the problems with social media, the place to start is through comprehensive data-privacy reform and consumer protections. Governments could also take action to break up big tech companies and prosecute them for anti-competitive behaviour. Lawmakers, who claim to care about children, could pass broader social and economic policies that we know would meaningfully improve children’s lives. Social media is a lifeline, especially for marginalised youth such as LGBTQ+ teens. Any policies that limit online access should centre on the most vulnerable children and adults.
To enact the social media bans being proposed around the world requires some system of age verification, which inherently means expanding surveillance technology. Because algorithmic systems cannot accurately estimate age, verifying a user’s age also requires collecting highly sensitive data or government documents to support the biometric data harvested. The laws being considered don’t all stipulate which system will be used, but there are significant privacy and safety concerns with all of them.
Friday 27th February 2026: Pakistan declares state of ‘open war’ after bombing major Afghan cities
Saturday 28th February 2026: US and Israel launch attack on Iran, as Trump says ‘major combat operations’ under way
Lot of it about these days. I was going to make a rather tasteless metaphor about it being like the Gorton and Denton by-election, with the Greens winning and Reform coming second, displacing the established parties. But of course the surprise war – to all but the very old – was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Given Iran’s participation in proxy wars in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and its hostile actions against Israel, Saudi Arabia, and probably other countries that I’ve forgotten (even leaving out Western ones), I’m surprised this didn’t happen earlier. As for Pakistan and their former protégés the Taliban, he who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.
Update: Israel says that Ayatollah Khamenei has been found dead in the rubble of his compound. For the sake of the Iranian people, so many of whom have been murdered by Khamenei’s regime in the recent protests, I hope that this is true. In contrast, Zack Polanski of the Green Party says “This is an illegal, unprovoked and brutal attack that shows once again that the USA and Israel are rogue states.” Illegal, Zack? If the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran wanted the protection of international law, they should have renounced and made recompense for taking diplomats hostage. In the absence of that renunciation the international community should have put them down like rabid dogs forty-seven years ago.
“How to detoxify the immigration debate” is the title of an LSE (London School of Economics) blog post by Hana Kapetanovic.
The debate is being dominated by the loudest voices with the most strongly held views; the voices of the majority aren’t being heard. It would sound very different if they were. In British Future’s segmentation of public attitudes to immigration, the biggest group by far is the “Balancer Middle”, with around half (49 per cent) of the public falling into this group. This group is not fundamentally opposed to immigration, but wants it to be “controlled and fair”.
and
As much as public perceptions are shaped by the media, political and information landscape, we mustn’t forget that public perceptions in turn shape media and political debates. The media publishes articles they think people will read. Politicians move to where they think the votes are, and yet are still faced with low trust. We need to break this democratic doom loop.
Breaking the democratic doom loop and detoxifying the debate sounds nice, but her proposal to do this is to take a group of a few dozen voters – a group that is a representative sample of the electorate but is self-selected in that the group is made up of the sort of people who want to participate and have time to do it – show them lots of briefings by government approved experts, have them converse for a few days guided by a government facilitator, and declare that whatever curated consensus the group comes to after this exercise has greater democratic validity than either the discourse of MPs who have actually been elected or the myriad private debates of the un-detoxified mass of the electorate.
This process is called a “Citizens’ Assembly” or a “Citizens’ Jury”. If all these grand titles boil down to is a bigger than average focus group, fine. Endearingly worthy, in fact. But the minute this “Citizens’ Assembly” starts to displace the powers of the old sort of assembly voted in by all the citizens, or the “Citizens’ Jury” starts to think that it can make decisions that affect other people’s lives as if it were a jury jury, then…
No.
This tweet (https://x.com/nicolelampert/status/2026017118341263795) from Nicole Lampert shows a 45 second video of Jeremy Corbyn, former Leader of the Opposition and twice the Labour Party’s candidate to be Prime Minister. In it, he says,
‘[I got a message] from the director of Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza. And he said there had been a delivery of boxes to the hospital by the IDF. A large number of boxes, 60 or 70 boxes. And after the IDF had gone off, they opened the boxes. And each one contained the skull of a Palestinian who had been killed. And there were also delivered [sic] of bodies of dead women in Pala- in Gaza – that had been opened and some of the organs removed. I mean, it’s hard to describe this. That is what is happening to the people of Palestine.’
As Alex Hearn said said in the comments, “He won’t believe British intelligence about a Russian chemical attack in Salisbury but he’ll believe a fantasy from Hamas run Gaza.”
There is a slightly longer version of the same video from CAMERA UK here: https://x.com/CAMERAorgUK/status/2026229835803107332. This starts a few seconds earlier than Nicole Lampert’s video and includes Mr Corbyn saying that he got the message from the director of Al Shifa Hospital on Thursday or Friday morning.
In case you are wondering, no, I do not believe the director of Al Shifa Hospital (who appears to be Dr Mohammed Abu Salmiya, although I would like Mr Corbyn to specify who gave him this message) for a moment. Not just because he is the head of an organisation controlled by Hamas, although that would be enough in itself to make me disbelieve him, but because this claim is identical in form to a centuries long stream of anti-Jewish blood libels about Jews murdering Christians or Muslims to harvest their bodies. The old version, exemplified by Little St Hugh of Lincoln had the Jews killing Christians as human sacrifices, usually with the additional detail that the Jews baked the victims’ bodies into their matzos, the unleavened bread served at Passover. This religious version of the blood libel is almost dead in Europe but still commonplace among Palestinians, including academics like Dr Samar Maqusi, formerly of University College London. The slightly updated version drops the matzos and has organ-harvesting as the motive instead. This one is very common among Palestinians and increasingly common among Westerners – witness the Right Honourable Jeremy Corbyn MP speaking in February 2026.
Why does Corbyn think the IDF would bring these boxes of skulls and dismembered corpses to Al Shifa hospital? [Update: OK, someone in the comments to the CAMERA post says the ceasefire agreement required the IDF return unidentified human remains to Gaza. But in that case the director of Al-Shifa hospital would know perfectly well what was going on, and it does not explain why there were claimed to be boxes of skulls in particular, nor why a medical doctor would specifically claim that women’s internal organs had been removed.]
Did Corbyn think to ask the director of Al-Shifa Hospital what he did with them? If the IDF ever deliver any boxes of skulls and corpses with missing organs to me, I’ll be sure and contact all the world’s most eminent forensic pathologists so they can carry out post mortems and give the evidence to the world.
Another update: This was no “misspeaking”. Jeremy Corbyn has publicly made the same allegation in more detail within the last few days. In the comments to the CAMERA post, someone called SHO_MY links to a video posted at 3:03pm on 23 Feb 2026 (https://x.com/EL4JC/status/2025949713292296383) from a pro-Corbyn account called #EL4C @EL4JC:
In the video Corbyn is addressing a public meeting. In his speech he says,
‘I’m going to read something to you. If you’ve already heard it, please be patient. If you haven’t, please be prepared to be shocked. I got a statement this morning from my good friend Doctor Mustafa Barghouti who’s an independent member of the Palestine National Initiative, a member of the Palestine National Assembly, and he’s forwarded me a statement by the director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex, Gaza, and I’m going to read it to you. “The director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex stated that approximately 10,000 individuals remain missing underneath the rubble across the Gaza Strip. Of these, around 5,000 persons are unaccounted for and their fate remains unknown. He further reported that 66 boxes were received yesterday from the occupying authorities – that’s the IDF – containing only the skulls of deceased victims. In addition, the bodies of women were handed over with no information provided regarding the location or circumstances of their abduction. According to the director, some of the returned bodies showed signs of severe mutilation including severed hands, while others had their abdomens surgically opened and subsequently restitched. Thus these findings raise great, raise grave concerns. He warned of credible indications of organ theft from the bodies of martyrs in the Gaza Strip, describing these acts as serious violations of international humanitarian law and human dignity.” And that I just received this morning. Just think about that statement. And I’ve no reason to disbelieve anything Mustafa Barghouti says, or the director of Al Shifa Medical Complex.’
I do.
And I ask again, what has the director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex done with these bodies that he says show credible indications of organ theft? What action has he taken to get what he believes to be evidence of a horrible crime out to the world so that impartial outside observers can assess it? What is he doing to get these “credible indications” of organ theft either proved or disproved?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton
@realLandsEnd
Sanism names a deep, pervasive belief that ppl who appear out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis are not trustworthy, less human & fundamentally disruptive to social life. It’s a hierarchy of credibility and belonging, where visible distress = danger/contamination
1:59 AM · Feb 23, 2026
https://x.com/realLandsEnd/status/2025752283435196882
This tweet by Beatrice Alder-Bolton, co-author of Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, has been garnering interest, as it was intended to do. As the title says, while I never doubt the humanity of people who appear “out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis”, I do think that while they remain in this state in public places they are disruptive to social life. I also think that while in this state they are untrustworthy.
Beatrice Alder-Bolton would like us to believe that she trusts them. If she had said that she sympathised with people visibly in psychiatric crisis, I would have believed her. I also sympathise. If she had said that she tries to engage with such people in order to help them, I might have believed her. I have met a few kind souls who habitually respond in this way. I admire them (the kind souls) from a safe distance. But when Beatrice Alder-Bolton implies that she thinks the man having a psychiatric crisis in front of her on public transport is trustworthy, I do not believe her. Her body goes onto high alert just like anyone else’s. And speaking for myself, you bet I don’t trust the crazy guy. You bet I think he might be dangerous. And if he has just emptied his bowels or his bladder in the carriage I do indeed fear contamination.
But in order to be worthy of trust myself, I cannot simply dismiss Beatrice Alder-Bolton as a high-functioning mad left-winger of the sort that even other left-wingers are beginning to realise are poisonous to their cause (“I am begging leftists and liberals to not do this again. It is normal and smart to be nervous and on high alert when someone behaves in a profoundly anti-social way (peeing on the subway) and/or a threatening way (screaming on the subway). The more cities tolerate this, the fewer people ride public transport, the worse that transport gets, and eventually it gets to a breaking point and people wind up voting for right-wing politicians who come in and crack skulls and way over-police.” – Jill Filipovic), I have to acknowledge that when Alder-Bolton’s way of thinking is described as “left libertarian”, the “libertarian” part is perfectly real.
I wrote about the influence that the libertarian writings of Thomas Szasz had and continue to have on me in a post called “Ideology and Insanity on the New York Subway”. Just as certain chemicals are harmless in themselves but dangerous in combination with others, the way that Szasz’s* libertarian ideals combined with the dominant suicidally empathetic ideals of our time has produced results like the random murder of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown.
There are ways to respect the equal humanity of those who cannot function in society while, well, continuing to have a society. Private property is one, and if that is too much for modern sensibilities, the rediscovery of the right to exclude mad people from public property. To use Ms Alder-Bolton’s word, sanism. The rediscovery of proud, unapologetic sanism.
*You say it “sasses”. In Hungarian the digraph “sz” has the same function as the English letter “s” and the letter “s” on its own is pronounced the same way as the English digraph “sh”. Confusingly, Polish is the other way round.
“UK minimum wage is raising youth unemployment, Bank of England’s Mann says” – Reuters, Feb 15th 2026
Do you remember your first crappy job? Today’s young people would wish for half your luck, writes Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian, Feb 20th 2026:
This week, unemployment rates for 18- to 24-year-olds hit a high not seen outside the pandemic since 2015. School leavers are now competing for work stacking shelves or pulling pints with overqualified new graduates who can’t find graduate jobs, at a time when pubs, shops and cafes don’t seem to be hiring. Even those employers strong enough to have survived lockdown routinely complain that it’s getting too expensive to hire staff – especially young ones.
The Centre for Policy Studies thinktank calculates that it will cost 26% more to hire an 18- to 20-year-old by this spring than it did in 2024. That reflects government decisions taken for perfectly good reasons, including hiking employers’ national insurance to fund the NHS, plus two chunky rises to the minimum wage for the under-20s (now £10 an hour) in line with manifesto promises to level it up with the higher adult rate (now £12.21) over the course of a parliament. No matter how noble the motive, once it costs the same to hire four teenage Starmers as it once did to hire five, there are likely to be consequences. Yet until this week, when an internal Labour argument about whether they could be inadvertently pricing young people out of work spilled on to newspaper front pages, political debate over why so many young people don’t have jobs has mostly involved blaming them for being anxious snowflakes. Injury, meet insult.
I am truly, non-sarcastically impressed that Ms Hinsliff and a few other left-wing commenters are now willing to admit that “there are likely to be consequences” to increasing the minimum wage. Hearing that word, “consequences”, enter left-wing discussions of workers’ pay is like a glimpse of a little mammalian form scurrying through the dust kicked up by a brontosaurus.
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