Labour spent decades denying the grooming gangs, now it dares to pose as on the side of victims.
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Andrew Lilico, on CapX
When people start holding out for the whizz-bang potential of tech, or just plain luck, to take us away from the brink, things aren’t good. Plan for the worst, and hope for the best is a smarter strategy. At the moment, the UK, like all too many other developed countries, appears to be stuck in what Lilico refers to the “doom-loop” of sluggish growth, an ageing population, falling revenue, higher borrowing, and so forth. The term “doom-loop” got used a lot, I recall, during the pandemic, when some of our present discontents took a turn for the worse. Breaking free of such a “loop” will require a level of brute courage and honesty that, unfortunately, will be a tall order. I am not even sure how far down this path Nigel Farage of Reform can go – particularly if he is trying to woo disgruntled, “our NHS” Labour voters in the north, Midlands and other parts of the UK. As for the Tories…they appear for the moment to have gone on a sabbatical. Where to turn for ideas? Well, I’ve started to read the books (here and here) on the UK’s economic plight by Jonathan Patrick Moynihan, who is a member of the House of Lords (“Baron Moynihan of Chelsea”), and a businessman and venture capitalist. The books are superbly written, and rather lovely items in their own right with the cartoons of famous politicians and pundits on the dust covers. They seem to chart a way forward. But at root the message is hard: cut spending, and shed a lot of functions. The question, for me, is when and how does the work of pushing back against the current insanity start, assuming that Starmer, Reeves and the rest of these jokers see out a full parliamentary term. At what point, for example, would an Argentinian-style chainsaw approach be required? Are we going to need a case of crisis treatment when all else has failed? June 15th, 2025 | 25 comments
 An hour ago the Twitter account “NHS Nurses”, @SocialistNHS, posted a video to Twitter that shows a fat White British man with a can of Stella in his hand and a Union Jack painted on his belly complaining about immigrants. “They’re taking all our jobs,” says the man. The NHS Nurses mock this reply with the words,
It is in fact possible to conceive of circumstances in which this would be a bad thing. There is an obvious conflict of interest between migrant workers and native born workers – or would-be workers. To observe this conflict of interest is not to take a side, but it is stupid to pretend it does not exist. A commenter called Robert Ferguson raises another way in which “Our NHS” being made up of migrants is not necessarily a good thing when he says, “Stealing other countries healthcare workers is not a good look.” I think Mr Ferguson’s belief that workers belong to their states of origin is fundamentally mistaken on moral grounds – and states which try to keep “their” workers by force are poorer than those which do not – but, still, the question of why this transfer of labour from Africa and South Asia to the UK takes place needs to be addressed rather than treated as a law of nature. I found the tweet via this comment from a group called “Labour Beyond Cities”, who said:
So the stereotypical fat, white, useless, racist Brit in the video is not real. He was a little too exactly like a socialist’s idea of a Reform voter to be true. As In a few months we won’t be able to tell. What difference, if any, does the man’s nonexistence make to the arguments involved? June 15th, 2025 | 6 comments
Farage wants healthcare more like France, Netherlands or Switzerland, which all have a varying degree of insurance element. NHS was always a terrible way to do healthcare, which is why rest of Europe didn’t copy it So, is it not ironic Reform party are open to at least exploring that kind of system, whereas the supposedly pro-European anti-Brexiteer elements who most depreciate Farage get the vapours at the notion of a more European healthcare system for the UK? 🤣 June 14th, 2025 | 17 comments
P.S. Before sharing this article with your friends and family, please be aware that the Government’s Prevent anti-radicalisation programme has recently declared that concern about mass immigration is “terrorist ideology”. A Prevent training course hosted on the Government’s website lists “cultural nationalism” as something that could cause you to be referred for deradicalisation. Prevent, you’ll remember, is the programme to which the Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana was repeatedly referred from as young as 13. He went on to stab a number of children and adults, 3 of whom died. Usman Khan, the terrorist who committed the London Bridge attack in 2019, was under Prevent monitoring when he carried out his attack in the middle of a prisoner rehabilitation event for which he had travelled to London. Prevent officers tasked with monitoring him had “no specific training” in dealing with terrorists. According to the Prevent training guidance, if you believe that “Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups” you will be referred to the very programme which failed to deal with them. This is Britain. So think before you think. – Konstantin Kisin (£) June 9th, 2025 | 4 comments
To win back free speech, Britain needs a new constitution, argues Preston Byrne. The problem:
Current law fails the rule-of-law test:
Legislation can not seem to fix the problem:
Byrne goes on to argue that the application of speech laws has changed over time due to fashion. The only real solution to that is absolute free speech like that granted by the US First Amendment. June 6th, 2025 | 73 comments
And Hermer’s characterisation of historical events is in any case cobblers, of course. International law did not stop the actual honest-to-goodness Nazis first time around; American industry and Soviet manpower did that. The idea that if only we had had the ECHR in 1933 all of the unpleasantness of World War Two and the Holocaust could have been avoided is, to put it politely, absurd. One doesn’t constrain a belligerent regime through an ‘international rules-based system’; one does it through force, or the threat of it. June 4th, 2025 | 20 comments
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
“Robert Jenrick turns vigilante in bid to tackle London’s fare dodgers”, reports the Guardian in a valiant effort to make tackling fare dodgers look like a bad thing.
The problem for the Guardian’s Kevin Rawlinson is that Jenrick’s video has indeed brought him fame and admiration, which has only been augmented by the sneering responses from various left wingers. Jenrick’s video has had 11.6 million views. The Secret Barrister’s response, “This is the most spectacularly Alan Partridge thing that has ever happened, and I include Alan Partridge”, has had 1.4 million views and a ratio for the ages. The alternative media outlet “The London Economic” has been busily putting out anti-Jenrick arguments that exemplify how left wingers miss the point, and which contain the word “akshully” even when they don’t:
So the Shadow Justice Secretary isn’t allowed to care about crime outside his own constituency? and
Oh no, won’t somebody please think of the poor Transport for London rules – since TfL itself evidently does not. I came across this tweet a week ago and bookmarked it because I knew it would soon be relevant:
May 30th, 2025 | 17 comments
So, why did we stop this taxation of “excessive” pensions pots? Because it lost revenue. It took tax rates well over the Laffer Curve peak if you prefer. So, what’s Ms. Rayner, Labour’s Deputy Prime Minister, suggesting today? That we reimpose a policy that we already know fails. Idiot’s a bit mild really, isn’t it? Also, it’s rather a pity that Googlebombs don’t work these days. May 26th, 2025 | 10 comments
“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
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. May 22nd, 2025 | 12 comments
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