There is a legit argument over what support we should give Ukraine. But I don’t understand how so many conservatives convinced themselves that Ukraine committed an unforgivable offense by getting themselves invaded.
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March 1st, 2025 | 54 comments - (Comments are closed)
 This is the news that Gary Lineker, Juliet Stevenson, Miriam Margolyes and others, a real Who’s Who of tossers, have written to the BBC telling it to reinstate its controversial documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone. The hour-long doc tells the stories of children and teenagers in Gaza. It was broadcast on BBC Two last week. But it swiftly got mired in scandal after it was revealed that the 14-year-old narrator is the son of a minister in the Hamas government. Yes, our public broadcaster put out a film about Gaza featuring the kid of an official linked to the Islamo-fascists that carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Reith will be turning in his grave. In their letter to BBC bosses, the doc’s defenders describe it as an ‘essential piece of journalism’. The criticism of the film is based on ‘racist’ assumptions about Palestinians, they say. The brass neck of these moral preeners is astounding. Imagine the ethical contortionism it must require, the outright doublethink, to damn as ‘racist’ those who are concerned that the BBC gave a platform to people with links to one of the most murderously racist movements on Earth. They sent their letter yesterday, as the Bibas family was being buried. Any comment on that? On the neo-fascist scum who dragged a mum and her two kids from their home for the ‘crime’ of being Jews? No? Fine, but kindly fuck off with the lectures about racism. – Brendan O’Neill is in very fine form. February 27th, 2025 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
‘Let’s be clear, we don’t have blasphemy laws in the UK.’ So said Jonathan Reynolds, the UK’s business secretary and premier solicitor impersonator, to the BBC earlier this week. Reynolds was pushing back against US vice-president JD Vance, who gave European leaders a very public dressing down at the Munich Security Conference last week for censoring their voters, and Britain for criminalising its Christians. Of course, Reynolds’s denial was about as trustworthy as his CV. You needn’t alight, as Vance did, on the vexed issue of ‘buffer zones’ outside abortion clinics, which have led to Christians being arrested for staging silent protests / prayers, to see that blasphemy laws have made a horrifying comeback in Britain. Easily a more vivid example is that, a day before Vance addressed the global great and good in Munich, a man was arrested for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in central London. Another man, who slashed at the Koran-burner with a knife, was also arrested. Welcome to 21st-century Britain, where we ‘don’t have blasphemy laws’ but you can be arrested – and stabbed – for desecrating a holy book. Maybe Reynolds could finally put that legal training to good use and explain the difference to us. February 22nd, 2025 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Earlier this week, the BBC admitted it had broadcast an hour of primetime television narrated by the son of a Hamas terrorist leader. This connection to terrorism was not initially disclosed to audiences.” – Danny Cohen, Daily Telegraph (£) Here’s a non-paywalled story about this. February 21st, 2025 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
I will forever remember that it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that made me realise the political right is as retarded as the political left. February 21st, 2025 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
We can no longer afford luxury beliefs. It’s not sustainable to have investment funds which shun arms companies on ESG grounds. It’s no good saying you want to save the planet if you can’t stop China and Russia controlling more and more of it. It’s self-harming to apply DEI policies to the military. The services are there to intimidate and, if that fails, kill our enemies, not impress them with how kind we are to people struggling with their gender identity. Laws policed by foreign courts which prevent our security and intelligence services doing what is necessary to keep us safe are weapons we have fashioned to arm the terrorists who wish to harm us. If our agents can’t do their job because of the ECHR, it must be changed until they can. Or junked. – Michael Gove (£), who for once is kind of making sense February 20th, 2025 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
However sympathetic you are to the populist cause, however “realist” on Ukraine, it is impossible to defend the head of the world’s most powerful nation putting out reckless semi-literate screeds like this. February 19th, 2025 | 71 comments - (Comments are closed)
The prosecution of speech crimes will erode public trust in the police and is taking us to anarcho-tyranny: the police will come after easy targets, and leave persistent criminals to run rampant. There is no British equivalent to the “thin blue line” movement in the United States, a segment of the population which will support the police come what may, and they may find themselves without a dependable public support base. While it is for politicians to repeal the laws which have killed free speech in Britain, the police must do their part too to revive Robert Peel’s founding principles and protect the safety, order and indeed liberties of the British people, instead of enforcing the political creed of multiculturalism over freedom, as many do today. February 18th, 2025 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Competition has utterly transformed telecommunications after the state Post Office monopoly was ended. The same happened with deliveries when Amazon came along with an innovative service. Uber and Airbnb have each transformed their markets. That is how competition works. It is Schumpeter’s creative destruction. Like evolution, it works by a selective death rate. It is not who owns the production, it is how easy it is for potential competitors to gain access to the market. Growth, productivity and innovation are driven by competition. Producers vie to satisfy the consumers, and those who do so survive, for a time, over those who do not. One thing that competition ensures is change. It leads to a dynamic economy, just as its absence leads to a static one. February 17th, 2025 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
I say “ourselves” because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values; we must live them. Within living memory of many in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. Consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that cancelled elections—were they the good guys? Certainly not. And thank God they lost. They lost because they neither valued nor respected the extraordinary blessings of liberty: the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, to invent, to build. As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can’t force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe. Unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners. I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be “hateful content.” Or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of “combating misogyny on the internet,” a so-called Day of Action. I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. As the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant (and I’m quoting) “a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.” Perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs. A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes—not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own. After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply that it was on behalf of the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before. The officers were not moved. Adam was found guilty of breaking the government’s new “buffer zones” law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person’s decision within 200 meters of an abortion facility. He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution. – J.D. Vance speaking at the Munich Security Conference 2025 February 14th, 2025 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Our problem in the West, I believe, is that we got into a vicious circle of decline. Our victory in the Cold War removed the pressure to remain productive and to constantly demonstrate the superiority of the Western model of free markets and free nations.” – (Lord) David Frost, Daily Telegraph. He refers to a new essay he has out to coincide with the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference that has been going on in London. I think it is a worthwhile read. February 14th, 2025 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Yes, Mr. Musk and his young team are seeing confidential government data. But he’s also the second most closely observed person on the planet, the exact opposite of the thousands who already have access to government data and stay invisible until they turn out to be Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Charles Edward Littlejohn or Jack Teixeira. Mr. Musk is said to be causing chaos but government programs are born in chaos—with congressional horse trading and payoffs to appease interest groups.” – Holman Jenkins, Jr. Wall Street Journal February 13th, 2025 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
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