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George Monbiot writes in – I kid you not – the Guardian:
July 10th, 2025 | 16 comments
 This will bring back memories for some of you:
I just missed experiencing the delights of the Initial Teaching Alphabet. I knew of it; a few of the Ladybird ITA books, including, if I recall correctly, “Peepl at Wurk: The Poleesman” as illustrated in the article, lingered in cupboards and crannies at my primary school. I remember asking what those funny letters were and being given a fairly good explanation. I was quite old before I realised that most people didn’t know about it. Looking at the Guardian article to which I link above and at the Wikipedia article on the ITA, the choice of letter forms seems to have been amateurish. Some of them resemble the letters of the International Phonetic Alphabet, but many of characters and pairs of characters used to represent vowels and diphthongs in the ITA contradict the way those same characters are used in the IPA. And what in the name of Paul Passy’s sainted aunt was the point of borrowing the “long S”, ʃ, from the IPA but then not using this character on its own to replace the digraph “sh”, as the IPA does? The ITA spelling of “ship” appears to be “ʃhip”, which is the worst of both worlds – the children had to learn the difficult concept that two letters can represent one sound, but still had to unlearn the funny S before they could read the word as it was written outside school. The Guardian article, and even more so the comments to it, make much of the fact that the creator of the ITA, Sir James Pitman (the grandson of the man who invented Pitman’s shorthand) was a Conservative MP. In fact he was the sort of Progressive Conservative that socialist charities like to have on the Board of Trustees to prove they are not irredeemably partisan. “As a member of parliament, he championed many notable causes, notably nationalisation, education, and world security.” He was one of a long line of would-be reformers of English spelling and comes across as motivated only by a well-meaning desire to help the children of the English-speaking world cope with our famously odd orthography. Pity the ITA was a flop. Well, probably a flop – though it certainly disappeared from schools quickly enough, and most of those who remembered it speak of the difficulty of having to learn to read twice, no systematic survey of its results was ever made, so we cannot be sure. A few brave voices in the comments say that it did them no harm and one or two even say it helped them. However the majority view (which I share) is that it was one of many foolish experiments carried out on schoolchildren by bright-eyed educationalists throughout the 1960s and 70s because parents in those days were far too trusting of authority. Some of the Guardian commenters take a harsher view. Someone calling themselves “karapipiris” thunders,
In vain do other commenters point out that Pitman’s knighthood was not hereditary and that the ITA was actually a cross-party initiative originally proposed by a Labour MP, Montefiore Follick; the upvotes still flow in a mighty river to Mr, Ms, or Mx Karapipiris for saying that the reason that this ill-conceived scheme was so casually inflicted on so many children was that its leading spirit had a knighthood. Karapipiris is wrong about the aristocracy part, but right about it being remarkable how little discussion or testing there was before an experiment which obviously had the potential to harm the children it was meant to help was launched in thousands of schools. Someone called “BFEMBis” thinks they have seen through the conspiracy:
Like Karapipiris, BFEMBis got plenty of upvotes for this asinine comment, although in fairness to the Guardian commentariat, the person who pointed out that all the posh schools listed start taking pupils at the age of thirteen got more. Once again, however, I must admit that BFEMBis does have the shadow of a point. I don’t know what the use of pseudo-Cockney eye dialect in “Makes yer fink,’ in’nit” was meant to convey, but the relatively low uptake of the ITA by private schools does indeed make yer fink. Despite being infested with at least as high a proportion of kaftan-wearers as the state sector, the private sector does seem to escape the worst of these fads. It introduces mad schemes just as enthusiastically as the state sector does but is quicker to dump them when they don’t work out.* Why is that then? Why do private schools on average have stronger immunity to fads than state schools do? If BFEMBis and his/her/their upvoters finked a little more deeply about that question they might realise why so many people remain willing to pay double for their child’s education despite all that the current government throws at them. A private school – or a “public” school in the British meaning of the term – cannot afford consistently bad results. “Bad” is a relative term: a surprising number of the UK’s fee-paying schools are aimed at children with special educational needs who have been failed by the state system. But whether success is measured in Oxbridge admissions or some kid who had been written off unexpectedly scraping a couple of GCSEs, a fee-paying school must be able to convince parents and prospective parents that the service they offer is worth the cost. If it cannot, those fees will dry up faster than you can say nief. *Very occasionally, they do work out. July 9th, 2025 | 20 comments
is all the terrorism carried out by Muslims. The London bombings of twenty years ago are but one entry in a long, long list. Muslims are much more prone to commit acts of terrorism than any other group in the world. This has been true for forty years. No, this does not mean that all or most Muslims are terrorists. As I have often said, some of the bravest people in the world are Muslims who know that the terrorists can find them and their families and fight them anyway. No, this does not mean it is decent behaviour to buttonhole your Muslim work colleague and harangue him or her for the crimes of their co-religionists. It does mean that unless and until the Muslim world confronts the fact that most terrorism is Islamic terrorism, the non-Muslim world is rational to view Muslims with extra suspicion and to discriminate against them in matters of security. The idealistic refusal of the Western part of the non-Islamic world (or rather its political class) to do this is folly, a folly that will eventually backfire on Muslims living in the West. Remember that photo of Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner taking the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement? Leaving aside the question of whether George Floyd’s death was murder – the late Niall Kilmartin thought it was not – it was inevitable that people would eventually ask why, if the then Leader of the Opposition and now Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was obliged to get down on his knees and beg forgiveness because the police in a foreign country had killed one man, should not Muslim leaders and opinion-formers make some similar acknowledgement that all these thousands upon thousands of murders preceded by a shout of “Allahu Akbar!” had something to do with Islam? Why can’t there be – why is there not – a “Kafir Lives Matter” movement? July 8th, 2025 | 34 comments
“The Covid ‘lab leak’ theory isn’t just a rightwing conspiracy – pretending that’s the case is bad for science”, writes Jane Qiu in the Guardian. That’s right. In the Guardian. My surprise at the location of the article was equalled by my surprise at the location of its writer: “Jane Qiu is an award-winning independent science writer in Beijing.” I didn’t know there were independent science writers in Beijing, but I guess there must be for an article on this particular topic written by someone describing themselves as such to appear. Anyway, she writes:
This is not news to anyone who has read Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s book Viral. Or to anyone who does not entirely get their news from the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times, come to think of it. Still, better five years late than never. Why now, I wonder? Did someone at the Scott Trust take Katharine Viner to one side and gently suggest that it would be nice if the customary Guardian delay between “this is an absurd far right conspiracy theory” and “it’s the fault of the far right for talking about it before we did and using up all the available words” was not too far out of line with the nearly four years it took to admit Hunter Biden’s laptop was real and Joe Biden was senile? Or is something big about to break? June 26th, 2025 | 18 comments
Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, and Anne Hidalgo, the Parti Socialiste mayor of Paris, have written a joint article for the Guardian called “In London and Paris, we’ve experienced vicious backlash to climate action. But we’re not backing down”. They write,
It is remarkable how people who would be ashamed to support a law to “counter the spread of illegal speech” happily praise a law that “counters the spread of illegal content.” The magic of words: just re-label “speech” as “content” – as being inside something – and it can now truly be contained, as in “restrained or controlled”. The same people regularly proclaim that Europe is a place which has banished censorship of the press. That is almost true, although both the EU and the UK governments are working to restore their old powers. In the meantime they are willing enough to temporarily refrain from censorship of ideas spread by old technology if it gives them cover for censoring ideas spread by new technology. Do not go along with their word games. The term “Freedom of the press” is not restricted to words conveyed to the public by means of a a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium. Nor does “freedom of speech” only refer to words that come out of mouths by the action of tongue and lips. In the words of a source they claim to respect, Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says,
Emphasis added. And while I’m emphasising things, let me also emphasise this: the minute I learn that an idea is being censored, I give that idea more credence. No, that does not mean that I automatically believe any censored idea entirely. (How could I? A million contradictory falsehoods are censored alongside the truth. The problem is that the act of censorship destroys our ability to tell which of them is the truth.) It means that I strain to hear what is being said behind the gag. It means that I start to wonder how real the claimed consensus is, if those who depart from it are silenced. It means that I start to wonder why the proponents of the “accepted” view feel the need to protect it from counter-arguments. I said in 2012 that my belief in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) was two and a half letters to the left compared to most commenters on this blog. Damn, it should have been one and a half letters to the right. Oh well, you knew what I meant. With regard to CAGW or whatever they are calling it now, whether I phrase it as my belief moving to the left or my disbelief moving to the right, the surest way to make that movement happen is to pass a law defining “climate disinformation as a form of harmful content”. Then I will know that the so-called scientific consensus on climate change is no such thing. If certain hypotheses cannot be discussed, not only is there no scientific consensus, there is no science. -*- A related post, but focussing on self-censorship rather than the government censorship that Mayors Khan and Hidalgo favour: “Bubbles, lies and buttered toast.” Any form of censorship is fatal to science. June 24th, 2025 | 13 comments
On Tuesday, Parliament voted to decriminalise abortion after 24 weeks. On Friday, Parliament voted to allow assisted dying. All eyes were on the latter change. LBC’s report was typical: “MPs pass landmark assisted dying bill by just 23 votes following emotional debate in historic social change”. In contrast, the change to the abortion law had an easy birth. It was passed by a landslide. Scarcely anyone talked about it before it was passed – it featured in no manifesto – and, beyond a few sighs, even the right wing press does not seem to want to talk much about it now. It is portrayed as a merely technical change to deal with a few edge cases. Much is made of the fact that late abortions are not being legalised; rather they are being decriminalised. “It would not alter the settled time limit for a termination,” said the Labour MP Stella Creasy, disingenuously in my opinion, given that it makes the settled time limit into dead-letter law. My record in political predictions is not great, but I will make three of them now. 1) This law will result in far more late-term abortions than its proponents predict. Many supporters of decriminalisation have pointed out, as did the Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi in the BBC article I linked to above, that nearly 99% of abortions happen before a pregnancy reaches 20 weeks, leaving just 1% of women “in desperate circumstances”. But the number of people willing to do a thing when there are no penalties for doing it is much greater than the number willing to do it when there are penalties. And as the number of late term abortions becomes higher, the reasons for doing it will become slighter. 2) It’s 2025. People film everything on their smartphones. People will film late term abortions. Supporters of abortion will do it to show that they are not ashamed. Opponents of abortion will do it to show how similar the foetus you are now allowed to kill at 35 weeks looks to the baby you are not allowed to kill at 40 weeks. (Or at 35 weeks if it happens to have exited the birth canal.) And some will livestream late term abortions to show, or sell, the video to the curious. The dissemination of close-up images of what a late term abortion looks like in real time will change the abortion debate in the same way that the dissemination of close-up images of what being on the receiving end of an airstrike looks like in real time have changed the debate about war. Of course visceral reactions to seeing war or abortion at close range do not change the logical arguments about either. But the Left has very little practice in countering the strongest argument against abortion, the very one that will be literally brought into sharp focus by the smartphone “record” button. As I said in a post called “How not to change minds on abortion”,
The arguments put forward in these Guardian articles and others written by progressives almost always relate solely to the rights of the woman. That is indeed an important question, but it avoids the question of whether the foetus also has rights. But pictures are harder to avoid than words. There is nothing new about abortion being shown on film. You can find examples from both sides if you look. One of the best known examples from the anti-abortion side is the 1984 film “The Silent Scream” made by Bernard Nathanson, a former abortion provider who became an anti-abortion activist. It shows live ultrasound footage of a 12 week old foetus being aborted. Critics argued that elements of the film that seemed to show the foetus feeling pain were deceptive, as a foetus at that stage of development is not capable of pain. This argument will be unavailable in the case of similar videos showing abortion in the third trimester. 3. As a result of public outrage, in ten or fifteen years’ time the UK’s abortion laws will be stricter than they have been since 1967. My guess is that the limit will be around 15 weeks, as it is in most of Europe. -*- I discussed how the issue of abortion relates to debates within libertarianism in this post from 2013: “Thinking aloud on a mountainside”. Quote:
June 21st, 2025 | 9 comments
Today’s Guardian has up an article with the title “Climate misinformation turning crisis into catastrophe, report says” and the strapline “False claims obstructing climate action, say researchers, amid calls for climate lies to be criminalised”. Quote:
June 19th, 2025 | 22 comments
An hour ago the Twitter account “NHS Nurses”, @SocialistNHS, posted a video to Twitter that shows a fat White British man with a can of Stella in his hand and a Union Jack painted on his belly complaining about immigrants. “They’re taking all our jobs,” says the man. The NHS Nurses mock this reply with the words,
It is in fact possible to conceive of circumstances in which this would be a bad thing. There is an obvious conflict of interest between migrant workers and native born workers – or would-be workers. To observe this conflict of interest is not to take a side, but it is stupid to pretend it does not exist. A commenter called Robert Ferguson raises another way in which “Our NHS” being made up of migrants is not necessarily a good thing when he says, “Stealing other countries healthcare workers is not a good look.” I think Mr Ferguson’s belief that workers belong to their states of origin is fundamentally mistaken on moral grounds – and states which try to keep “their” workers by force are poorer than those which do not – but, still, the question of why this transfer of labour from Africa and South Asia to the UK takes place needs to be addressed rather than treated as a law of nature. I found the tweet via this comment from a group called “Labour Beyond Cities”, who said:
So the stereotypical fat, white, useless, racist Brit in the video is not real. He was a little too exactly like a socialist’s idea of a Reform voter to be true. As In a few months we won’t be able to tell. What difference, if any, does the man’s nonexistence make to the arguments involved? June 15th, 2025 | 6 comments
“This will be in textbooks”, writes Maria Avdeeva.
In one sense, of course, it has been done before. The military history of the twentieth century contains many examples of large numbers of planes being destroyed on their airfields – by the Japanese at Pearl Harbour, by the Germans at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, and by the Israelis in the first hours of the Six Day War, to name but three. But such damage being done by itty bitty little drones that were considered little more than toys a few years ago is new. June 1st, 2025 | 41 comments
“Robert Jenrick turns vigilante in bid to tackle London’s fare dodgers”, reports the Guardian in a valiant effort to make tackling fare dodgers look like a bad thing.
The problem for the Guardian’s Kevin Rawlinson is that Jenrick’s video has indeed brought him fame and admiration, which has only been augmented by the sneering responses from various left wingers. Jenrick’s video has had 11.6 million views. The Secret Barrister’s response, “This is the most spectacularly Alan Partridge thing that has ever happened, and I include Alan Partridge”, has had 1.4 million views and a ratio for the ages. The alternative media outlet “The London Economic” has been busily putting out anti-Jenrick arguments that exemplify how left wingers miss the point, and which contain the word “akshully” even when they don’t:
So the Shadow Justice Secretary isn’t allowed to care about crime outside his own constituency? and
Oh no, won’t somebody please think of the poor Transport for London rules – since TfL itself evidently does not. I came across this tweet a week ago and bookmarked it because I knew it would soon be relevant:
May 30th, 2025 | 17 comments
So, President Macron’s wife appeared to push him in the face. A flood of analysis immediately followed. Here is the Guardian‘s offering: “Brigitte Macron’s push has reverberated around the world. Why was it met with a shrug in France?” The standfirst to Pauline Block’s article is: “Whatever the explanation for the incident, the reaction points to backward French attitudes – including from the president himself”. Although Ms Bock probably did not write those words, they are a fair reflection of her article. It casts its net wide, and among the fish brought up from the depths are the age gap between the Macrons, the convention by which the French press says nothing about the romantic relationships of French politicians, how would we feel if it was a man pushing a woman, and…
But why should he turn it into a “public health message” if he and his wife really were only larking around? There is something very cavalier about the Guardian‘s “whatever” in “Whatever the explanation for the incident”. The true explanation of the incident is the only thing that matters. If it was play, even play mixed in with annoyance (and such pretended fighting moves can be used to defuse quarrels as well as to escalate them), then it is nobody’s business other than the Macrons’ own, and the demand that he – or she – use it as a teaching moment is intrusive. How would Mme Bock like it if a similar demand for an impromptu sermon were made of her after some innocent but embarrassing incident in her private life was accidentally caught on camera? But if it was a real attack, there are indeed things to discuss. Does anyone have the right not to have their act of domestic violence investigated because their spouse or partner has not officially complained? Does anyone have the right not to have an act of domestic violence against them investigated because they have made no official complaint? Does it make any difference whether either party is male or female? Does it make a difference if either party is a political leader? If it was real. But we don’t know if it was. Looking at the video at quarter speed, I still couldn’t decide. So all the questions above are repeated with “act of domestic violence” replaced with “what looks on the face of it like an act of domestic violence”. In favour of the push crossing the threshold into being an assault, albeit not one intended to cause injury, is the fact that Mme Macron looked angry and refused to take her husband’s arm as she descended the steps, and that the Elysée Palace initially lied and said the video was fake. In favour of it being mere bickering horseplay is that the plane was full of bodyguards specifically charged with protecting the President of France. What do you think? May 29th, 2025 | 28 comments
“Kneecap rapper charged with terrorism offence over alleged Hezbollah flag at London gig”, reports the Guardian:
Kneecap, named after the IRA’s favourite type of mutilation, are a rap group who sing in the Irish language. They’ve had it all, the award winning biopic, the laudatory coverage in the Guardian, the visit from Jeremy Corbyn. And now they’ve had the visit from the counter-terrorism police. In these cases I never know whether to wrap myself in the mantle of libertarian righteousness and defend even these terrorist fanboys – it was only a piece of patterned cloth, FFS – or to say with Ulysses S. Grant that “I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.” The late Niall Kilmartin examined this dilemma in this post, “The equal oppression of the laws”. He gave a characteristically fair hearing to both sides, but concluded:
May 24th, 2025 | 39 comments
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