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“Imagine being Keir Starmer’s voice coach. It’s like being David Lammy’s academic advisor or Bridget Phillipson’s charm consultant.” (For those who don’t – wisely perhaps – follow UK domestic politics, David Lammy is Foreign Secretary, and Phillipson is Education minister. Both are dreadful and therefore classic front-bench ministers in this administration.) February 5th, 2025 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The British economy is lying flat on its back in an alleyway with wee dribbling down its leg. – Rod Liddle (£) February 1st, 2025 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
This Friday, January 24th, the UK Parliament is due to vote on a Private Member’s Bill that could lead to mass starvation, widespread disease and fatalities and the almost certain collapse of civil liberties and society within a few years. The bill has the support of a third of voting MPs and there is a clear and present danger that it could pass. Many MPs depart for their constituencies on a Friday and 200 remaining zealots could have a chance to swing a vote their way. The bill is a thinly-disguised attempt using meaningless climate and nature crisis verbosity to ration and control almost everything that citizens consume. The obvious attack on civil liberties should serve as a warning to other countries to stand against the Net Zero hysterics that have infiltrated large sections of elite British society. January 21st, 2025 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Now of course it’s true that the nature of home-schooling will vary family by family. That is precisely the point of it.” – David Frost, Daily Telegraph, warning about the move by the UK government to try and severely curtail home-schooling, which he correctly identifies as a way to enforce ideological conformity on the education of the young – something that the Left (and sometimes also on the Right too) has long sought. Frost writers about the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. January 17th, 2025 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The critique of private space companies by many on the left is frequently that those billions could be better spent helping the poor or other philanthropic goals. Of course, the Hayekian answer to that question is we don’t know. Predictions about outcomes based on investments are speculative, but there are two points in favor of the space billionaires overusing public money in the pursuit of opening up space. First, the billionaires have track records building successful institutions and seeing market opportunities. That doesn’t mean private sector investment is always right—take the Segway as a good example of that. But they have done it before…private money is much more agile and responsive than public money. When space exploration is driven by private actors and investors rather than bureaucrats, market signals will be received by people with a vested interest in acting upon them. Bezos, Musk, and Branson have experience with building on successes and ending failures. Bureaucracies rarely die and aren’t nearly as innovative as the private sector.” January 13th, 2025 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Another way to think about Elon Musk’s relentless attacks on Starmer – and apparent desire to see him out of office before the next election – is that he recognises the opportunity Britain presents, if it can only get its house back in order.” – Marc Sidwell, CapX. January 10th, 2025 | 25 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 that in a given country the wealthiest n percent of the population holds more than that percentage of the wealth, and the poorest n percent holds less; that to get to the wealth of the top n percent from the poorest, one must look at the bottom p percent (where p is vastly greater than n), and so forth. They proceed immediately to discuss how this might be altered.” – Robert Nozick, noting how the presumption of equality of wealth as a just default position is widely held and rarely challenged head-on. Anarchy, State and Utopia, page 232. The book’s second section, in which Nozick demolishes egalitarian ideas about equality and what he calls the “patterned” approach to justice in holdings, is in my view the best bit of the book, and enduringly influential on many classical liberals, libertarians, etc, to this day. The book was published in 1974, and Nozick was a Harvard academic at the time. (Proof that the 1970s was in some ways a fertile time for good ideas, and Harvard was in better shape than today.) January 5th, 2025 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
…it’s now illegal to build reasonable sized houses on a decent garden. Minimum density rules mean you just can’t. What was considered a “Home for Heroes” in the 1920s is illegal to build in the 2020s. Sorry, but that really is it. January 2nd, 2025 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
We also paid a visit to the pages of Scientific American, where assistant professor Juan P Madrid indulged his urges to police other people’s speech, while wasting the time and energy of those more obviously productive. “The language of astronomy,” we were told, “is needlessly violent,” with the word collision being singled out as particularly brutal and masculine. An astronomer carelessly referring to a planet being stripped of its ozone layer by a gamma-ray burst, would, according to Dr Madrid, be using “misogynistic language” and should therefore be subject to the sternest of hands-on-hips chiding and an official reprimand. December 26th, 2024 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Build 1,000 new state of the art nuclear power plants in the US and Europe, right now. We won’t, but we should.” December 23rd, 2024 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
The UK’s energy crisis results from years of neglect, unrealistic ambitions, and misplaced priorities. MPs are more interested in their public profiles. Industry lobbyists push profitable yet impractical solutions. And the media constantly prioritises speed over substance. As we edge closer to inevitable blackouts—if we indeed continue to follow the aggressive push toward “carbon neutrality”— the question isn’t if the wheels will come off but when. December 17th, 2024 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
“But there is a limit to how much we can gain from a combination of long-term reforms and controlled disruption. The deeper problem with the public sector is not the people who run it but the people who use it. The combination of an ageing population and a stagnant economy means that a growing number of countries can no longer afford the largesse of the post-war era. And the only viable long-term solution to this problem (barring a productivity miracle) is to cut big entitlements rather than to pretend that we can force the public sector to produce miracles. What really needs to be disrupted is not so much the workings of government as the public’s expectations.” December 12th, 2024 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
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