Encouragingly, in 2025, wearing a mask in shops, leisure facilities, workplaces or on public transport is for the most part confined to a tiny minority. Alas, the exception to this return of sanity is the health and social care sector, where a few pro-mask ideologues residing in the infection control departments recurringly succeed in muzzling their staff, patients and visitors. While these pockets of fanaticism exist, there is always a danger that – fuelled by the contagion of safetyism – the imposition of mask requirements can re-ignite across all community settings. With this in mind, on this five-year anniversary of the first UK mask mandates, the campaign group Smile Free is about to release a short film, Masking Humanity, in which health and social care experts vividly convey the enormous harms of masks in these settings. Please help to spread the word to assist in the mission to keep blanket masking out of health and social care.
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As AJP Taylor once wrote, “until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman”. That is emphatically not the case today. Having won the wars, the advocates of freedom comprehensively lost the peace. They lost to such a degree that those of us born and raised afterwards find it hard to comprehend the scale of the change. It’s easiest to start with the size of the state. To be sure, socialism in Britain has receded from its high point. The nationalisation of coal, iron, steel, electricity, gas, roads, aviation, telecommunications, and railways has been mostly undone, although steel and rail are on the way back in. But by comparison to our pre-war starting point, we live in a nearly unrecognisable country. In 1913, taxes and spending took up around 8 per cent of GDP. Today, they account for 35 per cent and 45 per cent respectively. To put it another way, almost half of all economic activity in Britain involves funds allocated at the behest of the government, and over half of British adults rely on the state for major parts of their income. And if anything, this understates the degree of government control. Outcomes which are nominally left to the market are rigged by a state which sees prices as less as a way for markets to clear, and more as a tool for social engineering. – Sam Ashworth-Hayes (£) May 31st, 2025 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “Kneecap rapper charged with terrorism offence over alleged Hezbollah flag at London gig”, reports the Guardian:
Kneecap, named after the IRA’s favourite type of mutilation, are a rap group who sing in the Irish language. They’ve had it all, the award winning biopic, the laudatory coverage in the Guardian, the visit from Jeremy Corbyn. And now they’ve had the visit from the counter-terrorism police. In these cases I never know whether to wrap myself in the mantle of libertarian righteousness and defend even these terrorist fanboys – it was only a piece of patterned cloth, FFS – or to say with Ulysses S. Grant that “I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.” The late Niall Kilmartin examined this dilemma in this post, “The equal oppression of the laws”. He gave a characteristically fair hearing to both sides, but concluded:
May 24th, 2025 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
Taliban ban chess being played in Afghanistan as it’s deemed ‘un-Islamic’ – Daily Star
The Telegraph quotes an official from the now-defunct Afghanistan National Chess Federation as saying, “This is a suspension, not an outright ban, but it feels like the death of chess in Afghanistan. Chess runs in the blood of Afghan society. You’ll find it in homes, cafes and even village gatherings. Afghans love chess, we’ve won international medals, and the game is part of our cultural identity.” The Cambridge Dictionary defines “endgame” as “the last stage in a game of chess when only a few of the pieces are left on the board”. One of the last remaining pieces of Afghanistan’s cultural identity that was other than “Islam” has fallen. Afghanistan is entering the endgame. Purity spirals are not limited to Islam – a well-known Radio 4 documentary made by Gavin Haynes covered how even the cosy communities of Instagram knitting culture and young adult novels were consumed by the frenzy – but Islam is so prone to them that I am tempted to say that Islam is not a medium in which vortices form but a vortex itself. May 13th, 2025 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
Police face lawsuit after former officer arrested over ‘thought crime’ tweet, reports the Telegraph:
So long as the consequences of police misbehaviour are born by the taxpayer, not the police, why should they care? Words are cheap. They’ll settle out of court, promise not to do it again, and do it again.
He voted with the majority. They could tell he was a wrong’un. May 11th, 2025 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Press Gazette reports: Essex Police loses accuracy complaint versus Telegraph over Allison Pearson questioning
(The tweet in question criticised two-tier policing of Pro-Palestine marches.)
Why does it matter whether it was or was not a “non-crime hate incident”? Because Essex Police tried to claim that because Pearson was – ludicrously – being investigated for an actual crime (someone had complained that the tweet had incited racial hatred), that meant that the Telegraph could not report on their own columnist having the rozzers turn up unannounced at her door on Remembrance Sunday.
May 1st, 2025 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
A song from the late 90s by Len. But this request (not to) was in vain, the UK government has announced £50,000,000 of funding to ‘dim the Sun’, in a bid to counter climate change, reports the Manchester Evening News, on the back of a paywalled report in the Daily Telegraph. Scientists are planning on ‘dimming the Sun’ in a bid to curb global warming. The UK government is set to announce funding of up to £50m of funding for Sun-dimming experiments in the coming weeks, the Telegraph reports. Does no one remember our wise Danish King Canute? He showed, over 1,000 years ago, that the State is all but powerless in the face of Nature. Of course not. Here is more on the plans. It comes as the National Environment Research Council (NERC) announced on April 3 that it will invest £10 million of new funding to study these solar radiation management schemes (SRM). According to Professor Mark Symes, the programme director for the Government’s advanced research and invention funding agency, known as Aria, there would be “small controlled outdoor experiments on particular approaches”. These experiments could include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere or brightening clouds to reflect sunlight. Crucially, there is an acronym ‘SRM’, so this is one of those funding streams that will take on a monstrous life of its own. One might think that the Manchester Evening News (think Seattle but without the glamour) might have something to say seeing as it is a notoriously rainy city, but not a peep about the absurdity of it. Nor has there been any comment on the impact on solar energy generation, which provides ‘carbon neutral’ energy (but what about the deuterium lost in solar energy production?). The UK government seeks to control the Sun, and how much it shines on you. Chairman Mao and the four pests comes to mind. To be fair, these proposals have generated plenty of online ridicule, but that won’t stop it. That the UK is circling the drain is perhaps better shown by this Icarian hubris than anything else. And of course, once you accept their premises, you are only arguing about tactics and strategy, not the ends.April 26th, 2025 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Apple is doing the public a service in challenging the government on this important matter of principle. Encryption enables more than just ‘secure’ communication – it ensures freedom from government snooping, too. That’s why privacy and freedom of expression have long been considered mutually reinforcing rights. Encryption protects not only personal data, but also the ability of journalists and human-rights activists to operate without fear of surveillance or reprisals. Compelling companies to pre-emptively weaken those protections risks chilling users’ ability to communicate freely, share sensitive information or challenge the powers-that-be. LOL Remember this? April 24th, 2025 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the Guardian, April O’Neill writes,
April O’Neill holds that the people who need to be forcibly protected from hearing bad opinions are old people who distrust left wing media sources. Ms O’Neill is the winner of The Guardian Foundation’s 2025 Emerging Voices Awards (19-25 age category) recognising young talent in political opinion writing. April 19th, 2025 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
The modern view of a councillor is that they are there to promote state policies, such as Diversity and Inclusion (see, for example, the Equality Act 2010 – and the duties it lays down). A councillor, or even a Member of Parliament, is not there, according to the modern view, to represent ‘reactionary’ residents or constituents – not AGAINST the state, but rather the elected representative is there to help the resident or constituent get benefits or services from the state. And to promote Progressive attitudes and behaviour. I am not saying I agree with the modern view – I am just explaining what it is. After all supporting ‘reactionary’ residents might imply that one shared their opinions and, therefore (according to the modern view – of the training colleges and so on) deserved to share their punishment. April 5th, 2025 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
The first lockdown in the UK did not technically have legal force until three days after Johnson’s address. But that didn’t stop police going after people almost immediately. This may sound like a trivial oversight, but it does underscore the authoritarian nature of how lockdown rules were made and imposed. For a brief period at least, police were arresting people on the basis not of laws passed democratically in parliament, but on the mere words of the prime minister, merely because they had been uttered in a television broadcast. This really did bring Britain into ‘police state’ territory. March 25th, 2025 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Why? How many real-life, off-screen cases of femicide has Tate actually been provably linked with? Not as many as a casual newspaper reader may be led to presume. Andrew didn’t bomb all those little girls to death at the Manchester Arena a few years back, did he? Mere days after Adolescence went up on Netflix, the UK’s counter-terrorism tsar, Robin Simcox, released a report into 100 convicted UK-based terrorists arrested between 2004 and 2021, analysing their “mindset material”, like social media activity. This found that, of the 100 studied, 85 could be classed as Islamists, 14 as ‘far-Right’ (whatever that even is now) and… one as being an incel. Appropriately enough, really, for such a committed breed of professional loners. – Steven Tucker (£) March 24th, 2025 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
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