Might I suggest #Together and Big Brother Watch for coverage and campaign news.
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September 24th, 2025 | 9 comments
 Sir Keir Starmer has announced the UK’s recognition of a Palestinian state. Several other countries have done likewise. I think the consequences of this will be very bad. There will be even more Muslim terrorism worldwide. It evidently works. There will be more use of tactics like taking hostages and livestreaming murders and torture for political effect by non-Muslim groups and states, too. These tactics evidently work. Those people who think that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians still won’t get to see what actual genocide looks like, but Israel will be more willing than before to kill Palestinian civilians in order to destroy Hamas. Israel has lost a major motive for restraint. The less likely it is that Israel will defeat Hamas, the more it is in its interests to use other, cruder methods to deter and/or physically prevent future attacks from Gaza. These methods could include annexing some or all of the territory and expelling the inhabitants, or finally flooding the entire network of tunnels with seawater, only this time with no concern for ecological damage. The ecological damage would be the point. It is hard to secretly build military infrastructure in a barren desert, or to hide among civilians in a depopulated land. Contrary to Sir Keir’s main motive for doing it, his government’s recognition of Palestine will cause even more British Muslims to change their vote away from Labour in favour of Islamic identitarian parties. As Osama bin Laden said, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” This formation of an explicitly Muslim power bloc will in turn cause even more non-Muslim British people to move from merely opposing further Muslim immigration to Britain (that sentiment is already practically universal) to wanting to get rid of the Muslims already here. I do not wish for any of this. I just think it is what is likely to happen. September 22nd, 2025 | 57 comments
It’s worth at this point reminding ourselves what Starmerism is. Those getting wrapped up in the rigmarole of bond markets and gilt yields, Rachel Reeves crying, and fiscal headroom miss the point. Keir Starmer has no real interest in the economy as a domain of production and trade, consumption of goods and services. The closest he comes to an interest in markets is likely that “the economy should provide for everyone”. Instead, as the devout Starmerologist J. Sorel puts it: “everything about Keir Starmer’s life so far has taught him that his project — the defence of British society as it existed from 1997-2016 — can be achieved by simply illegalising all opposition. He openly avows this idea, and has never strayed from it.” Everything that Keir Starmer has remained devoted to has been the rejection of grubby, noisy, and messy politics, and the pursuit of constitutional reforms that would make it difficult for his foes to come back from. September 20th, 2025 | 12 comments
“Police in free speech row after telling cancer patient to apologise for social media post”, the Telegraph reports.
[…]
If Plod the Prefect comes round to “engage” with you, do what Ms Anderson did and stand your ground. The chances are good that they will back off. Even if they don’t, you will have kept your self-respect.* This is the alternative. *Another way to preserve your self-respect in these times is not to join the police. No officer should have to endure this type of deliberately humiliating hazing ritual. September 19th, 2025 | 30 comments
Corbyn and Sultana at War Over ‘Your Party’ Membership Launch, Guido Fawkes reports.
It appears that Sultana and Corbyn have now split.
Update: Someone I know alerted me to this:
It’s genuine. Here’s the link to Companies House: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16619803/filing-history Note that the “Cessation of Jeremy Bernard Corbyn as a person with significant control” did not happen today but on 15th September, three days ago. September 18th, 2025 | 25 comments
The Guardian has up a panel discussion with the title “Labour is in a mess. Is there anything Starmer can do to turn things around? Our panel responds”. One of the panellists is Ann Pettifor. She writes,
As a means to “save” Keir Starmer’s government, I am not convinced by the rationing bit. True, price controls are nearly always popular – until tried. But the people’s cry of “We want an Inflation Control Office to stop us buying things!” is heard only in Ann Pettifor’s dreams. I would advise less rich food late at night. September 18th, 2025 | 26 comments
With this in mind, we may understand Reform better through considering the political thought of the party’s court historian, Sir David Starkey, than we do by mocking Dame Andrea Jenkyns’ sequinned conference sing-along. As summarised by Nicholas Harris in the New Statesman: David Starkey at conference “lectured on the Blairite coup of 1997, which he compared to a ‘slow burn French Revolution’… condemning ‘the catastrophe of human rights’, the Supreme Court and the ECHR… while musing on historical analogies for the coming Reform takeover: the 1832 Reform Act, the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart Restoration”. This is not conservatism as we have come to understand it, but counter-revolution: a swift and total toppling, through packing the Lords with sympathetic new peers, and a bonfire of Blairite legislation, of New Labour’s unloved and malignant constitutional order, the “theoretick dogmas” of our own revolutionary lawyers. September 17th, 2025 | 6 comments
This has been the subject of some debate. Tommy Robinson says 3 million. The police say 150,000. That’s quite the discrepancy. Oddly enough, I am in a rather good position to judge. I was there. Did I count them all? No, I didn’t. What I did do, however, was skulk around the back. Oh, and do some maths. The plan was for everybody to assemble in Stamford St which, for those who don’t know, is a street in South London between Blackfriars and Waterloo Stations. Stamford St was packed and there was an overflow into Southwark Road, Blackfriars Road and Blackfriars Bridge. I was right at the back of the overflow into Southward Road. I would say that extended for – if I am being generous – 100m. (My apologies for using Nazi units but I can’t be arsed to do the conversion.) Whitehall is 700m long. Stamford St is about the same length. So with the overflows we get 1000m of march. Stamford St is maybe 30m wide. So we get the whole march – I didn’t see many late comers – in 30,000m². So how many people per metre? I understand the rule of thumb is 4. For comparison, Wembley manages to 90,000 people sat down in 90,000m². Four standing in the same space as one seated? Bit of a squeeze but possible. So, 30,000 times 4 gets us to 120,000. I’m with the police. Next question: does it matter?
September 16th, 2025 | 31 comments
It has been interesting to see the predictably alarmed reactions to the huge march in London organised by Tommy Robinson et al. One remark I heard on a video was “The most alarming aspect of the event was just how normal the vast majority of the marchers were… the sort of people you’d meet in a country pub, or at a half-time queue for the loo or a concert.” At first, my reaction to hearing that was “surely the normality of the crowd should have made the march less alarming”… but then I realised the marchers not being stereotypical bovver boys makes plausibly labelling the demonstration as “far-right” vastly harder. Yes, I can see how that might alarm some people as the magic words racist, fascist, and far-right lose their power from years of overuse and the fact there were reggae bands and alarmingly black faces in the crowd. September 14th, 2025 | 16 comments
Reform’s ascent isn’t happenstance; it’s reckoning. Lib Dems dally, Greens posture, Your Party pricks, but Farage’s fortress stands. Starmer’s Midas-in-reverse transmutes promise to peril; Reform reclaims the realm. By-elections were harbingers; polls, the proclamation. Britain beckons sovereignty’s return. The unstoppable? It’s here: enjoy, embark. September 12th, 2025 | 24 comments
“Unfortunately, the current Labour government, like every unpopular administration before it, has reached for the oldest trick in the book, persecuting the law-abiding. Sunak did it with smoking bans and talk of national service, Starmer is doing it with the motorist. The plan includes mandatory eye tests for older drivers, stripping pensioners of their independence and dumping the cost onto the already-buckling adult social care system when Dad now needs a taxi just to get to the shops. It lowers the drink-drive limit from 35 to 22 micrograms, despite Britain already having the second-lowest drink-driving deaths in Europe. There is even talk of slashing the national speed limit in the countryside to 50 mph — a direct attack on rural life, where the car is not a luxury but a necessity.” One of the problems with certain types of new regulation is getting them enforced. If the cops are too busy going around pinching people for saying mean things on social media, how are they going to enforce some of this nonsense? Unfortunately, Sir Keir Starmer, who is not exactly loved in the rural parts of the UK, is still in thrall, as far as I can tell, to a form of the Precautionary Principle when it comes to risk and safety. And he may think that he might as well stick it to rural people who need to use a car as they will be very unlikely to vote for him. There may be a sort of “damn you bastards” reflex here. I recall that he was a fan of lockdowns, and while he remains in power, there is a risk that he’d impose them if international organisations demand it. The authoritarian itch is powerful in “Capt. Hindsight”. Less negatively, there may be a warped kind of mistaken desire to improve humanity going on here (shades of the old “nudge” issue I wrote about a few days ago, although we are now in open coercion territory.) According to this way of thinking, it is better to pile on costs and inconvenience to everyone if it saves a single life, whether that means cutting rural speed limits, making granddad check his eyes regularly (I have some sympathy for this, after all, pilots are regularly checked out) and reducing alcohol. There is a sort of cost-benefit analysis that can be done to figure out what the unintended consequences of certain measures are. Unfortunately, fatal/near-fatal car accidents make for horrible headlines (and they are horrible, period), while the increasing drudgery and cost of living in a heavily regulated country does not translate so well into news stories. That is a factor that explains the rise of Big Government more generally: the whole issue of “what is seen and what is unseen”, as Bastiat described it. All this heavy-handedness is is a reason, I think, why we need more of the pro-safety elements at work to come from insurance. If an elderly person does not get their eyes tested and they are involved in a crash, or they don’t have tyres with a minimum grip, or they haven’t had an MOT test, then that means an insurance policy does not pay out, etc. Let those who make a living out of correct risk assessment drive such things (pardon the pun) and not a political class that seems to crave this sort of micro-management of our waking hours. But then as long as we have “our NHS” socialist model of healthcare, it will always be argued, by those of a communitarian bent, that those who fail to minimise risks to others impose unwanted costs on innocent third parties, and to “save” the NHS, such regulations, however far-reaching, must be enforced. But this, in my view, is an argument against socialised medicine, not for increasing regulation. September 9th, 2025 | 20 comments
Labour bigwigs have spent so long portraying themselves as morally superior that they have come to believe their own hype. They really do seem to think they are, as a group, almost beyond reproach. That they are the good guys, the virtuous ones. What they lack in any substantial political vision for Britain, they make up for in skyscraping self-righteousness. Which blinds them to their own hypocrisy. September 7th, 2025 | 13 comments
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