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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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News comes to me that an advert, a video in the style of a musical, for something called Coinbase, which I understand is some form of crypto set up, which is why the advert has been banned, and about which I know nothing more, (and this is not advice or recommendation on financial matters) is not permitted in the UK by the regulator, OFCOM. Not that I doubt that OFCOM are interpreting the regulations correctly. That the advert might be termed mildly satirical would be a fair description, and take a look at the shop names. It’s almost an updated Oliver Twist. Has it been made by people familiar with modern Britain? I would say so.
As Burns said in his ode ‘To a louse’:’O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!’.
Thanks to comedian Andrew Lawrence for the tip.
It comes after Mrs Badenoch wrote in The Telegraph that Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were making “even bigger mistakes” than Ms Truss and had not learnt the lessons of her mini-budget.
Responding, Ms Truss says: “It is disappointing that instead of serious thinking like this, Kemi Badenoch is instead repeating spurious narratives. I suspect she is doing this to divert from the real failures of 14 years of Conservative government in which her supporters are particularly implicated. It was a fatal mistake not to repeal Labour legislation like the Human Rights Act because the modernisers wanted to be the ‘heirs to Blair’. Huge damage was done to our liberties through draconian lockdowns and enforcement championed by Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings.”
– Liz Truss as quoted in an article by Daniel Martin (£)
My drug of choice, however, is X—though using it doesn’t really feel like much of a choice. I’m the editor of a daily politics-focused newsletter, where my duty is to provide readers with a more or less comprehensive digest of everything they need to know from the day’s news. On a normal day, the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is check X. The last thing I do before going to bed is check X. I browse X while I sip my morning coffee. Throughout the day, I take breaks from writing to see if anything new has hit X that I might need to incorporate into my writing. After I’m done for the day, I keep monitoring X throughout the evening to get ahead of the next day’s stories. When I try to ignore X and source my writing from the “mainstream” press, I inevitably find that The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal has omitted some critical piece of context without which it is impossible to truly understand the story. If I take too much time away from X—on weekends, for instance—I inevitably find I lose the thread of the news, and have to work doubly hard on Monday to catch up.
– Park MacDougald (£) in an article about actual drugs of the performance enhancing kind.
There are too many laws and too many policemen… police persons. Don’t you ever feel that? Every new regulation diminishes us. We’ve got to the point where we do more harm than good.
– Inspector Bert Lynch, Z-Cars (last ever episode), 1978. The episode was written by Troy Kennedy Martin who had – appropriately enough – created the long-running series in the first place.
War Footing Latest, against you that is, not the Russians
– Think Defence
The BBC says “According to Ofcom, platforms must not host, share or permit content encouraging use of VPNs to get around age checks.”
I encourage the use a VPN to get around all state abridgement of people’s right to access the internet, including age checks. Say no to police state Britain, not to mention a VPN enhances your security online.
But here’s the rank hypocrisy that makes Kyle’s bile choke in his own throat: if anyone’s “on the side of predators,” it’s Labour’s sordid history with child protection scandals. For years, Labour councils and figures turned a blind eye to grooming gangs terrorising vulnerable girls in Rotherham, Rochdale, and beyond, all to avoid “racism” accusations. Starmer, as DPP from 2008-2013, oversaw the CPS dropping Savile investigations despite evidence. Labour MPs voted against Tory and Reform calls for a grooming gangs inquiry in January 2025, only U-turning in June after relentless pressure. Reeves defended the delay as Starmer “assuring himself”, code for political cowardice. These are the types who opposed national accountability for decades of cover-ups, letting predators roam free. Kyle’s party fought tooth and nail against exposing the truth, yet he dares sling Savile slurs at Farage? It’s spectacular hypocrisy, a deflection from Labour’s own filthy laundry.
And what of Kyle himself? This isn’t a man driven by pure principle. Peek at his financial backers, and the picture muddies. Kyle’s register shows donations from the Tony Blair Institute (£1,694 in 2023), that globalist echo chamber pushing tech regulation and surveillance agendas. He’s pocketed from unions like CWU, and Labour MPs, including Kyle, have raked in over £280,000 from the Israel lobby for trips and perks. Big Pharma and US healthcare lobbyists have chipped in too, via the Blair outfit. Most seriously In February, his department gave a £2.3 million contract to Faculty AI, a company that had donated £36,000 to him in May 2024. Worse still is the case of Emily Middleton, formerly an employee of Public Digital, who was seconded to his office alongside a £66k donation who has been appointed a Director General in his department (via @StarkNakedBrief)
– Gawain Towler
I cannot recall a more disgusting article being published in a mainstream newspaper than this one written by His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology:
Farage is siding with disgusting internet predators – Peter Kyle
Last year, Nicholas Hawkes sent photos of his erect penis to a 15-year-old girl. It’s sadly too common an occurrence, making victims feel exploited, disgusted and unsafe.
But in this case there were consequences. A month later, Hawkes was convicted under the new offence of cyber-flashing created by the Online Safety Act – the first person to be convicted.
So when Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, boasts about his plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, it makes my blood boil.
Repealing the law would benefit men like Hawkes, a registered sex offender, and other disgusting predators who contact children and groom them online.
[…]
But as well as blocking disturbing and upsetting images and messages from children’s feeds, it [the Online Safety Act] also makes huge changes to the online environment children inhabit.
For the first time, it gives social media platforms an obligation to proactively keep children safe. It forces them to detect and remove horrific child sexual abuse material, which has shamefully lurked on the internet, barely hidden from those sick enough to seek it out.
[…]
And these are not just warm words – it’s a regime with teeth. If companies don’t follow the law, then Ofcom, our independent regulator, has the power to fine them up to 10 per cent of their global turnover.
For the most serious of offences, allowing child sexual abuse to run riot on a platform could even see someone criminalised. Plus it gives our police forces new offences to go after online criminals.
I cannot understand how anyone can be against these measures. How could anyone question our duty to keep children safe online – particularly when it comes to child sexual abuse content and from online grooming?
“Why do you hang back from punishing the traitors, comrade? Is it because you are one of them?” Demagogues have used that line for centuries.
Over at Bloomberg, columnist Matthew Brooker notes that a mix of policies have caused London’s housebuilding sector to almost stop.
Homebuilding in London has all but ground to a halt. The capital is on track to deliver less than 5% of its annual target of 88,000 homes with half the year gone, by far the worst performance in two decades. Such a collapse in the UK’s largest and richest city would be a poor omen for economic growth and productivity at the best of times. For this to be occurring under a one-year-old Labour government that arrived in office promising a generational uplift in housing supply is extraordinary.
The figures almost defy belief. Housing starts have fallen by more than 90% compared with the financial year ended in 2023, official data from the Greater London Authority show.
The reasons:
Why is this happening and what can be done? The words “perfect storm” crop up frequently. A thicket of interlocking factors is at play, some of which have built up over years. On the supply side, the immediate trigger is the creation of a new Building Safety Regulator, or BSR, with a set of more stringent requirements for high-rise buildings in the wake of the 2017 Grenfell fire, which killed 72 people. Delays in approvals have compounded post-pandemic challenges of inflated construction costs and higher interest rates.
Meanwhile, successive tax changes, some dating back more than a decade, have driven away offshore investors, according to Molior founder Tim Craine. Developers build only in response to demand, he points out. Investors who buy apartments “off plan” before they are complete play a crucial role in financing construction and providing a signal of likely end-demand. Their declining presence has raised speculative risks and undermined the financial viability of projects.
Former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne targeted a series of tax measures at buy-to-let investors in the belief that they were driving up house prices and squeezing out first-time buyers. The trouble is that the private-led investment model is intimately connected to the delivery of affordable housing for deprived communities. London boroughs grant planning permission for apartment complexes on condition that developers designate a portion, typically 35%, as affordable. These are bought by housing associations that then sell or rent them out at discounts to the market. If there are no private buyers, there will be no affordable housing either.
The article makes no reference to the current immigration issue in the UK, but it is fair to say that even without large net inflows of people to the UK, the low level of house building and new residential accommodation is a problem if we want a refurbished, modern housing stock. Add in the immigration issue, then we have a crisis. The current UK government made much of housing when it was elected last July. The data for London is lamentable.
The article also reminded me of the planning dysfunction, among other things, that was identified as problems in last year’s major “Foundations” report into why UK seems unable to get anything built, and certainly erected on time, and on budget, these days.
The free and open internet has now ceased to exist in the UK. Since Friday, anyone in Britain logging on to social media will have been presented with a censored, restricted version – a ‘safe’ internet, to borrow the UK government’s language. Vast swathes of even anodyne posts are now blocked for the overwhelming majority of users.
The Online Safety Act was passed by the last Conservative government and backed enthusiastically by Labour. Both parties insisted it is necessary to protect children. Supposedly, its aim is to shield them from pornography, violence, terrorist material and content promoting self-harm. Age-verification checks, we were assured, would ensure that children would not be exposed to inappropriate content, but adults could continue using the internet as they please. Yet as we have seen over the past few days, on many major tech platforms, UK-based adults are being treated as children by default, with supposedly ‘sensitive’ content filtered from everyone’s view.
– Fraser Myers
Police state Britain needs nothing less than a revolution.
Remember, when the grooming gangs hit the news again in January, after decades of these gangs operating, the official line from No10, repeated by the regime media, remained that ‘the real story here is the tech oligarchs spreading disinformation and the spread of the Islamophobic far right’.
They briefed fake news to the media that ‘Cummings is writing Elon’s tweets’. The PM gave a speech about it. Useless regime hacks like Lewis Goodall called it ‘his best speech’. Goodall explained that the ‘real story’ is the influence of Elon, social media radicalising the right, ‘the emergence of a common UK/US online right … making extremist, until recently fringe politics mainstream in British conservatism… Far right thinking … has become mainstream. Remember that the notion of ubiquitous Muslim grooming gangs has long been a trope of extremism, despite little evidence’ — and the idea that there’s been a national conspiracy to deny victims justice ‘is dangerous nonsense’ (Goodall, Jan 2025).
This was ‘the mainstream’ pundit view in SW1-media-land only 6 months ago. Being pathological and pathologically incompetent, the regime then tried to organise another layer of coverup with a report but this went wrong because the scale of evidence is so vast the author rebelled and told enough of the truth to make the No10 line untenable. Narrative Whiplash kicked in: suddenly the gangs were no longer ‘far right disinformation’, they’re real, there’ll be an Inquiry, though of course the core Insider belief hasn’t changed — the purpose of the Inquiry (from Whitehall’s perspective) is to control the story and suppress as much as possible voters connecting the collapse of border control and the systematic rape/abuse/killing of English children.
– Dominic Cummings
When Israel struck Iranian targets on June 13th, something strange happened four days later—thousands of Twitter accounts tweeting about Scottish independence just… stopped.
That silence? It wasn’t just suspicious. It was evidence.
In this video, I walk you through how a digital blackout in Iran exposed one of the largest Iranian disinformation operations targeting the West. Working with Cyabra, we tracked over 1,300 fake accounts—AI-generated personas pushing division in the UK, attacking the BBC, and praising Iran. And when the lights went out in Tehran, those bots vanished too.
Then they came back… parroting entirely new propaganda.
This is a masterclass in how modern influence warfare works—how state-sponsored actors weaponize your feed and how even silence can be a signal.
– Ryan McBeth
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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