We have had laws against ‘inciting racial hatred’ for 60 years. It’s the settled, apparently inviolable position of British law that there are some things so dangerous they cannot be allowed to be said. We have taken, in effect, the precise opposite path to the United States. It was in the 1960s that the US Supreme Court gave the First Amendment its teeth, following a slew of high-profile cases brought by silenced civil-rights leaders. Where America came to see free speech as the answer to bigotry, Britain came to see censorship as essential to multicultural harmony.
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“Labour seems to think the British economic renaissance is going to be rebuilt on minor changes to a food and drink trade that amounts to 2-3 per cent of our exports, yet if it really believed this, why is it killing family farms and making them erect solar panels instead?” – David Frost, former chief Brexit negotiator in the former Tory government, writing about the sellout deal that UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer agreed with the EU at the weekend. The deal effectively puts the UK back into the EU Single Market on farming and food; it also gives a number of concessions that, even if they don’t completely reverse the UK’s independence from the EU, make a number of steps in that direction. This is one of those cases where the devil is in the detail. Like Lord (David) Frost, I want the UK to go for mutual recognition of trade standards, which is what sovereign nation states, such as New Zealand, already do without fuss. Apparently, this is outside the mental universe of Brussels negotiators and the UK government. The reference in the quote above is to the policy of the current Labour government to impose inheritance tax on family-run farms, a measure that will force a number of these farmers’ families to sell up, possibly selling out to energy companies instead. From where I stand, it seems pretty clear that Starmer wants to reverse Brexit, even if it falls short of formal re-entry into the EU. May 20th, 2025 | 21 comments
 The idea that the British government should subsidise an American mine is pretty weird. Very weird even. But it does seem to be about to happen. Why can’t they leave us just to piss away our own money in our own ways? Why this insistence upon doing it wholesale on obvious disasters? May 19th, 2025 | 6 comments
The biggest reduction we ever enjoyed in our electricity costs was after the newly privatised electricity industry installed gas power stations across the UK. It halved our electricity costs. The biggest increase we’ve ever seen was after the Government imposed “green” ideology on the electricity industry. It has tripled our electricity costs so far. So as with every statement made by the UK Government about energy, this one is wrong. Shutting down our oil and gas exploration, and increasing taxes on existing production, makes us poorer. May 18th, 2025 | 4 comments
There’s an old saying in policing, usually uttered after the latest scandal or disaster: ‘The public get the police they deserve.’ It reflects how police officers feel about the elites who set their rules of engagement, as well as the occasionally capricious public they serve: whatever the police do will be criticised by somebody. Which, probably, is as it should be; policing isn’t a popularity competition. If a police officer is performing their duties properly, ‘somebody’ is going to have their day ruined. That ‘somebody’ used to predominantly be criminals. Sadly, that’s no longer the case. Yet still, I wonder, What did we, the British people, do to deserve the police we have now? Read the whole thing. May 17th, 2025 | 33 comments
May 16th, 2025 | 34 comments
Last year the UK Met Office was shown to be inventing long-term temperature data at 103 non-existent weather stations. It was claimed in a later risible ‘fact check’ that the data were estimated from nearby well-correlated neighbouring stations. Citizen super sleuth Ray Sanders issued a number of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to learn the identity of these correlating sites but has been told that the information is not held by the Met Office. So the invented figures for the non-existent sites are supposedly provided by stations that the Met Office claims it cannot identify and are presumably not recorded in its copious computer storage and archive. May 12th, 2025 | 18 comments
In Britain, in 2025, whether or not you should be able to criticise a religion, mock its practices, burn its texts, is an alarmingly live issue. And when I say ‘a religion’, you know which one I’m talking about. This debate has lit up again this week, following the charges brought against Hamit Coskun for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London in February. His one-man protest against the Islamist turn of Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been chalked up as a religiously motivated public-order offence, drawing the condemnation of shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick and causing an X feud between two MPs. Rupert Lowe – the member for the Very Online right – condemned our backdoor blasphemy laws, while Adnan Hussain – one of the so-called Gaza independents who rode a wave of sectarian, anti-Israel bile into parliament at the last General Election – accused Lowe of singling out Muslims under the guise of freedom of speech. May 9th, 2025 | 30 comments
You put in self check out in response to high wage costs, but then you find new problems. High trust systems cannot survive in the presence of low trust people. And this is why, in the second world, you cannot have nice things… And ultimately, the incentives and selectors turn the systems into pastiches of their intent. May 6th, 2025 | 68 comments
Our diagnosis is that what really worries The Guardian here [about Argentina] is that this will all work. For where would the progressives be if classical liberalism were shown – once again – to work? May 5th, 2025 | 11 comments
“Yes, like any philosophy, neoliberalism has its limits, and as with any philosophy, some of its adherents get overexcited and take things a bit too far. But given where we currently are, and where we are likely to go in the near future, focussing on the risk of “too much neoliberalism” seems bizarre to me. It is as if you were lost in the desert, and your main worry was that if you find an oasis, you might end up drinking too much water, and get overhydrated. Maybe one day, neoliberalism will be so popular that there really will be a non-trivial risk of taking it too far. If so – that will be a good day.” – Kristian Niemietz, Editorial Director, Institute of Economic Affairs. (Part of his commentary is this recent apologia to libertarians from Noah Smith, a US centre-leftist who appears to have some intellectual honesty and grit, which is refreshing, and so it appears, rare.) It might be helpful of critics of neoliberalism bothered to define it clearly. (Tim Worstall has a related takedown of George Monbiot’s recent forays into this territory. Worstall is, as you might expect, unimpressed.) May 4th, 2025 | 19 comments
Before it’s possible to suggest a solution to a problem, it’s necessary to grasp the root cause of the problem itself. A sort of Reverse Chesterton’s Fence exercise. So, what has gone wrong? As we never tire of repeating it’s the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors. That is, for the past 78 years we’ve had that coherent national plan. With a long term vision. Run by the Rolls Royce minds of the Men in Whitehall who know best. Which is how we’ve ended up with the output we’ve got, something that would disgrace a Trabant factory. As it is national control of planning – the TCPA really does define who may build what where, is the nationalisation of land use – that is the problem then the solution is to get rid of what caused the problem. Blow up the TCPA, proper blow up – kablooie. May 3rd, 2025 | 27 comments
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