The World Cup starts today, with England hoping to be somewhere around the latter stages. I took my former in-laws to an England game once. They were Asian Doctors, and had lived for decades a few miles from Wembley yet had never been there. It was 2010 and the era of football hooligans was well … Read more
Another summer and, once again, another riot. By now the pattern is becoming familiar. A tragedy occurs involving a white victim and a non-white perpetrator. The victim’s family appeals for calm and asks that their loss should not be used to fuel racial hatred. The appeal is ignored. “We want to use Henry’s heartbreaking story … Read more
The short answer to this question is no, don’t be daft. Reform are the party of the elite, the leadership dominated by public schoolboys and inherited wealth. They have inherited many of the establishment networks of power, money and influence which sustained the Conservatives for over a century. So why do I hear this so … Read more
Why People Get History So Wrong “History is the biography of great men,” once said a very famous idiot. It’s a terrible way to understand the past — academically, intellectually, and frankly, morally — and yet people still believe it. Loudly. You can see it in the endless culture war skirmishes over symbols. The recent … Read more
Are Parts of Britain Under Sharia Law? The easy answer is: no. So if no part of the UK is under Sharia law, why are people so angry about it? To understand that, you need to start with how the British legal system actually works — which is already more complicated, and more unusual, than … Read more
I was working in Leeds when I first started seeing adverts for WKD. Billboards, TV spots—loud, garish, and oddly confrontational. They didn’t look like advertising as we understood it. Traditionally, advertising sold aspiration. Buy this and you’ll be better, cooler, more successful—more attractive, even. WKD did the opposite. Its campaign—“Have you got a WKD side?”—didn’t … Read more
Donald Trump’s second term is going no better than his first. He has failed to end the war in Ukraine, failed to produce a credible healthcare plan, and failed to rein in government spending. Inflation remains elevated, unemployment is rising, and growth is slowing. Strip out AI investment and deficit spending, and the underlying economy … Read more
The schism on Britain’s hard right is no longer gossip; it is formal. Rupert Lowe, reportedly buoyed by encouragement from Elon Musk’s online ecosystem, has launched a rival to Reform. His one-MP outfit is called Restore. The launch, staged in Great Yarmouth, leaned heavily into hard-line rhetoric on immigration and “national restoration”: mass deportations, drastic … Read more
Strike!!! Britain is on strike. A massive strike to bring the government to its knees and force a general election. At least, that’s the claim. This isn’t just people refusing to work for a week. The strike also involves not shopping, not going to the pub, not doing… anything. Total withdrawal from society. You didn’t … Read more
The latest idea to send right-wing commentators into a frothing panic is “decolonisation”. Apparently, it represents an existential threat to Western civilisation — an effort to censor traditional Western ideas and replace them with pernicious liberalism and “woke”. This is, of course, nonsense. Empire Didn’t Need Explaining My grandparents were moderate supporters of the British … Read more