Last week, Nigel Farage announced that a future Reform government would ban working from home. If that sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve heard it before. Boris Johnson floated the same idea four years ago. Same rhetoric. Same applause lines. Same fatal flaw. Reform supporters bristle when critics describe the party as a retirement home for … Read more
No, It’s Not “Foreigners Using the NHS” It’s total nonsense, despite what you read online. To be eligible for NHS treatment, you have to be ordinarily resident in the UK. Your entitlement doesn’t last forever once you leave. If you’ve been living abroad and you return, you are not automatically treated as a permanent UK … Read more
I’ve been back in the UK for a few months now. A few things have struck me after being away for a while. People are angry — really angry. As soon as you get off the plane you encounter people wound up and looking for a row. A trip to the supermarket means road rage, … Read more
This is controversial and will remind some people why they hate blogs. But it’s been nagging at me for months, so I’m saying it anyway. For the past few months I’ve seen a lot of right-wing content circulating online about cousin marriage in the UK — specifically whether it should be banned. Leaving aside the … Read more
Asylum Hotels The Anger People are angry about asylum seekers in hotels. I spent a long time trying to contact people who had expressed concerns online, asking them why they were angry. The most common response was abuse. Many resented being asked to explain themselves and responded with more anger. They seemed genuinely stunned to … Read more
The United States has published its new National Security Strategy. It is a strange document: steeped in conspiratorial thinking, openly ideological, and almost unrecognisable as a traditional American foreign policy text. It is so odd, in fact, that the temptation is to dismiss it as unserious — roughly as plausible as Donald Trump’s repeated plans … 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
The usual suspects on-line and in the old media are getting themselves worked up that families with a Polygamous marriage are getting an increase in benefits. This is typical of the hysteria from the Daily Express The not so hidden subtext is that these are Muslim families, and as such should not be allowed to … Read more
Hysteria about immigration continues to dominate political debate in the UK — in the traditional media and across social platforms. The government is now under intense pressure to introduce tougher asylum rules to “appease public concern”. But that concern isn’t rooted in reality. Since Labour came into power last year, net migration to the UK … Read more
Does immigration increase crime? Every time I log onto Facebook, old school friends share horror stories about crime waves supposedly driven by immigrants. London, apparently, is now a crime-ridden hell hole plagued by gangs of foreign criminals. Other big cities, we’re told, are heading the same way. They’re so convinced this is true that it’s … Read more