An Afghan migrant who was deemed an adult by UK authorities because he had a “protruding Adam’s apple”, bags under his eyes and skin that “did not appear youthful” has won £25,000 after a judge ruled he was a child.
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Engaging with the Great Reform Bill 2029 idea, it’s a masterstroke. In an era of short-termism, Lee’s proposal for a omnibus bill echoes the 1832 Act’s transformative power, bundling fixes to overwhelm opposition and deliver systemic reset. It’s not pie-in-the-sky; it’s pragmatic radicalism, recognising that piecemeal tweaks won’t cut it against the “malign web.” October 15th, 2025 | 25 comments
 You can be a “partner”, a “reliable supplier” or perhaps even an “ally” of Brussels. You can even stand next to Ursula von der Leyen in London and proclaim the end of the Brexit wars. But unless you are an EU member state, you will always be a competitor and ultimately expendable. October 13th, 2025 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
“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 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
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 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Visit BBC Broadcasting House in Central London and you’ll pass a statue of George Orwell accompanied by a quote from an unpublished preface to Animal Farm: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”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 - (Comments are closed)
“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 - (Comments are closed)
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 - (Comments are closed)
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 - (Comments are closed)
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 - (Comments are closed)
“…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 - (Comments are closed)
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 - (Comments are closed)
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