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“Nuclear has re-entered the chat because it’s the only energy source that can deliver enough clean, safe, round-the-clock electricity to feed AI. Nuclear is to AI what oil was to the Industrial Age. It’s the fuel for a new era of exponential progress.” Stephen McBride and Dan Steinhart, from the Rational Optimist Society. October 12th, 2025 | 6 comments
 There is no offence of blasphemy in our law. Burning a Koran may be an act that many Muslims find desperately upsetting and offensive. The criminal law, however, is not a mechanism that seeks to avoid people being upset, even grievously upset. The right to freedom of expression, if it is a right worth having, must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb. We live in a liberal democracy. One of the precious rights that affords us is to express our own views and read, hear and consider ideas without the state intervening to stop us doing so. The price we pay for that is having to allow others to exercise the same rights, even if that upsets, offends or shocks us. October 11th, 2025 | 12 comments
Visit BBC Broadcasting House in Central London and you’ll pass a statue of George Orwell accompanied by a quote from an unpublished preface to Animal Farm: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” When the statue was erected in 2017, the head of BBC history said it would serve as a reminder of “the value of journalism in holding authority to account”. If only. The statue isn’t a symbol of the BBC’s journalistic excellence, but a standing reproach for its failure. – Helen Joyce, in an article called The BBC’s dangerous lies in the print version of The Critic October 3rd, 2025 | 29 comments
“The legitimacy of altering social institutions to achieve greater equality of material condition is, though often assumed, rarely argued for. Writers note than in a given country the wealthiest n percent of the population holds more than that percentage of the wealth, and the poorest n percent hold less; that to get to the wealth of the top n percent from the poorest, one must look at the bottom p per cent (where p is greater than n) and so forth. They then proceed immediately to discuss how this might be altered. On the entitlement conception of justice in holdings, one cannot decide whether the state must do something to alter the situation merely by looking at the distributional profile or at facts such as these. It depends upon how the distribution came about.” (page 232) – Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Robert Nozick, First published in 1974. I wonder if any of the leaders of today’s political parties in the UK have read it, still less understood the profound way that the late Harvard professor eviscerated egalitarian “patterned” ideas of justice more incisively than arguably anyone else, before or since. Somehow, I doubt they have. In this day and age of talk about wealth taxes and other horrors, Nozick is well worth reading again. October 1st, 2025 | 14 comments
There’s a fascinating case study to be made of how in a generation or so the British ripped leagues of old Etonians, Harrovians, Wykehamists out of institutions to be replaced by “the best and brightest”, and then inexplicably everything became shit September 30th, 2025 | 30 comments
In the UK right now, @X is performing the same function that Radio Free Europe did in the Eastern Bloc. Without this site, or if it still remained Twitter under the control of the American left, our government would be much more able to hide things they don’t want to discuss. – Peter Hague September 29th, 2025 | 21 comments
I’m wondering, is this another one of those speeches [Keir Starmer] didn’t get round to reading before he hit the lectern. – Gawain Towler September 27th, 2025 | 5 comments
“…there is surely no doubt that politics has a bitter tone, a harsher edge, a public unpleasantness that occasionally spills over into crisis or just onto the streets. Why is this so? It’s nothing to do with social media. It’s nothing to do with “populism”. It’s none of the fashionable solutions. It’s simple. Politics is more polarised than ever before because more is at stake in politics than ever before. When is a lot is at stake, people argue more loudly. They are less willing to accept defeat. They want their views pressed hard.” – David Frost, Daily Telegraph (£) His article is entitled “Blame the Big State For Our Polarisation Crisis.” September 26th, 2025 | 11 comments
Let me make my position unequivocally clear: I will not comply. If this scheme becomes law, I will resist it with every fibre of my being, joining the ranks of those who have historically stood against arbitrary power. This is a fight we cannot afford to lose, for it edges us closer to the continental nightmare of citizens as compliant serfs, beholden to an all-seeing state. To understand the gravity of this threat, we must first confront the profound dangers it poses to our civil liberties. At its core, a mandatory digital ID transforms the relationship between citizen and state from one of mutual respect to one of constant suspicion and control. Imagine a world where accessing basic services, banking, healthcare, employment, or even public transport, requires scanning a digital credential that logs your every move. This isn’t hyperbole; civil liberties organisations like Big Brother Watch have warned that such a system would create a “bonfire of our civil liberties,” enabling mass surveillance on an unprecedented scale. September 25th, 2025 | 35 comments
It’s worth at this point reminding ourselves what Starmerism is. Those getting wrapped up in the rigmarole of bond markets and gilt yields, Rachel Reeves crying, and fiscal headroom miss the point. Keir Starmer has no real interest in the economy as a domain of production and trade, consumption of goods and services. The closest he comes to an interest in markets is likely that “the economy should provide for everyone”. Instead, as the devout Starmerologist J. Sorel puts it: “everything about Keir Starmer’s life so far has taught him that his project — the defence of British society as it existed from 1997-2016 — can be achieved by simply illegalising all opposition. He openly avows this idea, and has never strayed from it.” Everything that Keir Starmer has remained devoted to has been the rejection of grubby, noisy, and messy politics, and the pursuit of constitutional reforms that would make it difficult for his foes to come back from. September 20th, 2025 | 12 comments
With this in mind, we may understand Reform better through considering the political thought of the party’s court historian, Sir David Starkey, than we do by mocking Dame Andrea Jenkyns’ sequinned conference sing-along. As summarised by Nicholas Harris in the New Statesman: David Starkey at conference “lectured on the Blairite coup of 1997, which he compared to a ‘slow burn French Revolution’… condemning ‘the catastrophe of human rights’, the Supreme Court and the ECHR… while musing on historical analogies for the coming Reform takeover: the 1832 Reform Act, the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart Restoration”. This is not conservatism as we have come to understand it, but counter-revolution: a swift and total toppling, through packing the Lords with sympathetic new peers, and a bonfire of Blairite legislation, of New Labour’s unloved and malignant constitutional order, the “theoretick dogmas” of our own revolutionary lawyers. September 17th, 2025 | 6 comments
Just to make this plain. Electricity is sold at the one price. We do not get charged different amounts for a green electron than a dirty brown one (we might well do dependent upon time of day, reliability of supply, etc, but that doesn’t change this particular argument). We have one price for the output. Whoever produces cheaper will make more profit. Because that’s just how profit works – revenue minus costs is profit. Therefore either renewables are cheaper and thus they make more profit or renewables are not cheaper and they make less profit. There is no version of this story in which renewables are cheaper and yet they make less profit. September 16th, 2025 | 71 comments
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