I was going to say that Guido’s headline cannot be improved upon, but, on second thoughts, the headline-writer really should have mentioned that the hamster was dressed as Godzilla. Details matter.
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March 20th, 2026 | 16 comments
 The Daily Sceptic features this article by Daniel Lü: “Why Using Parliament to Police MPs’ Opinions is More Dangerous Than the Opinions Themselves”. It starts,
and ends with this:
I urge you to read the part in between. It is a strong re-statement of basic principles. And defend Zarah Sultana’s right to speak freely as an MP, vicious and stupid though she is. March 19th, 2026 | 25 comments
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,
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”:
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:
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. March 17th, 2026 | 27 comments
This letter appeared in today’s Guardian:
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? March 16th, 2026 | 27 comments
The Daily Mail features this story about a pro-Palestinian activist:
As commenter “MoleUK” says on the UKPolitics subreddit,
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. March 14th, 2026 | 27 comments
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”. March 11th, 2026 | 40 comments
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:
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:
and the caption to the Instagram video says,
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. March 7th, 2026 | 11 comments
Green Party policy is to “Abolish Landlords”, only they say they don’t really mean it, only they do.Dean Conway has written a supportive article for Central Bylines about the Green Party’s eye-catching new housing policy:
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:
That policy would increase the need for rented housing rather a lot. March 4th, 2026 | 18 comments
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:
March 2nd, 2026 | 10 comments
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. February 28th, 2026 | 15 comments
“How to detoxify the immigration debate” is the title of an LSE (London School of Economics) blog post by Hana Kapetanovic.
and
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. February 26th, 2026 | 14 comments
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,
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 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? February 24th, 2026 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
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