Standing at the fence I found myself asking what a Cochrane would do now, and the answer is uncomfortable, because the need for one is so plain. Our age has its Basque Roads, victories thrown away by commanders unwilling to close. It has its prize-court corruption in the procurement billions that vanish without a ship, a road or a reactor to show for them. Above all it has its Stock Exchange trials. Ask the sub-postmasters. Ask the infected blood families. The machine that ruined Cochrane, the machine that would rather destroy the innocent than admit error, has never been better fed. His modern heir would fight it as the original did, by knowing it better than its own officers. Cochrane was an engineer’s son and an inventor to his fingertips, and his heir would read a procurement database the way Cochrane read Spanish gunnery, as a system with a blind spot waiting to be boarded. He would use parliamentary privilege to name names. He would be unclubbable, immune to honours, indifferent to the lobby. And he would accept the price, to be ruined at least once, publicly and with relish, by the people he had frightened, and to come back over the prison wall.
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Justin Bronk has published a very interesting update on RUSI: Four Years On: An Update on the Air War Over Ukraine August 3rd, 2026 | 4 comments
 Power, which used to be the responsibility of Cabinet, has now been diffused away to quangos, devolved governments, NGOs, and judges. Like La Serenissima before us, it seems impossible for the government of the day to do anything meaningful about the structural problems facing us. As the world changes around us still, Britain is currently powerless to act domestically or internationally. This was the tragedy of Venice. She had not forgotten how to be grand nor rich nor even how to administer — only how to act. Venice did not collapse overnight. She became a museum slowly, then all at once. Britain need not follow the Serene Republic. But to do so, we must give up the pretence that politics as usual will get us out of this. Winning an election is not the same thing as possessing power. We must have politicians who are willing to understand how the existing system functions so they can begin to cut the Gordian knots of the restraints that bind us to managed decline. As this will necessarily involve wresting power back from the endless sea of quangos, NGOs, and other veto players which have enjoyed a comfortable existence under this new settlement, a plan for institutional resistance must be prepared. All the things that have been quietly removed from the political arena must be put back into play. Our own version of The Myth no longer serves us — and so it must be discarded. We are not favoured by the divine, nor do any of the quasi-religious mantras of the legalistic class provide us any fortune. July 28th, 2026 | 36 comments
Xerox PARC invented the graphical interface, the mouse, and networked computing, and gave the ideas away almost by accident to visitors from Apple and Microsoft who knew what to do with them. Blockbuster was offered the chance to buy Netflix for fifty million dollars and turned it down. None of this was written into the nature of the ideas themselves. It was written into who happened to be in the room. July 26th, 2026 | 11 comments
So let us name the principle actually in operation, because it is not sub judice. Sub judice is a rule, and rules apply evenly or they are not rules. The principle in operation is that speculation is dangerous when it is inconvenient and wholesome when it is useful. Ann’s case, where the early inferences pointed somewhere the official mind preferred not to look, attracted the full apparatus of hush. Suffolk, where the inference flattered the approved threat picture, was narrated by a Secretary of State before the evidence was in, and un-narrated by nobody when the evidence declined to appear. The Tates, indefensible in the court of public opinion, may be tried there nightly without a murmur. That is not the law of contempt. That is malinformation doctrine wearing the law of contempt as a disguise, truth and silence alike deployed by reference to harm as the managers define it. – Gawain Towler, discussing a now debunked terrorism claim, the Tate brothers arrest, and Ann Widdicombe’s murder… and the very selective approach taken by the state in the pursuit of justice. July 24th, 2026 | 5 comments
These cases might initially read as isolated absurdities: a pensioner’s raided home, a fine for a nickname, a meme investigated as though it were genuine Nazi propaganda. Taken together, they describe a pattern in which laws designed to protect democracy from its enemies are being turned against ordinary citizens engaged in perfectly legitimate political speech. Germany’s experience should be a lesson for other countries and their respective governments. It is a reminder that speech laws drafted with the best of intentions — to prevent a return to fascism, to protect politicians from genuine harassment — can, without firm safeguards, be distorted and become instruments of routine political policing. As Dr Zitelmann’s case shows, even a historian who has devoted his career to studying the dangers of totalitarianism is not immune from being investigated under laws that increasingly resemble the very thing they were built to prevent. July 23rd, 2026 | 15 comments
Christopher Nolan’s flick The Odyssey is probably a work of marketing genius, or maybe not, we will see. Many are now saying ‘based’ culture warriors and those repelled by certain very outré casting choices have got it wrong and it is actually good. However, you will never convince me the casting was not epic trolling: a black actress as Helen of Troy, possessed of a face unlikely to have launched a thousand ships, at least not in her direction; an African-American rap singer; a transgender actress playing Sinon (a character actually from Virgil’s Aeneid); and the goddess Athena played by Zendaya Coleman, an actress known for practicing economy of expression. I have not seen Nolan’s Odyssey and probably never will, not for any particularly ideological reason but because of what an old chum of mine with whom I did Classics observed after seeing it.
Yes, my friend is a bit of a wag, but he does read Latin and Greek, and if I am going to watch something called The Odyssey, I want the protagonist to be Odysseus, not just called Odysseus. July 21st, 2026 | 56 comments
There is a Crowdfunder live at the moment which tells you everything you need to know about the government of this country. The Centre for Migration Control asked the Ministry of Justice a simple question. How many migrants have been convicted of murder, rape and the supply of weapons? Not opinion. Not spin. A number. The government collects it, sits on it, and refuses to publish it. The CMC took the case to the Information Commissioner and won. The ICO ruled that the MoJ must publish the data for 2018 to 2024. And what did our Labour government do, faced with a lawful ruling that the public should be told the truth? It lawyered up. It is going to court, at your expense, to prevent you from knowing what it already knows. It is meanwhile withholding the 2025 figures too, presumably on the basis that if a cover-up is worth doing it is worth doing thoroughly. July 20th, 2026 | 18 comments
The inimitable Preston Byrne has compared two think tank proposals for restoring free speech within the United Kingdom in A Tale of Two Bills: Comparing the Adam Smith Institute’s and the Prosperity Institute’s Free Speech Proposals. This kind of thing is an essential part of setting the intellectual ground work for the future. July 15th, 2026 | 11 comments
She was funny in a register entirely her own. On day one in the Strasbourg parliament I stepped out of an office into one of those interminable corridors to see her at a distance, walking in lockstep with Claire Fox, the two of them deep in conversation. Two women of ferocious conviction from utterly different traditions, the convent Tory and the old revolutionary, neither of them over five foot four, moving down the corridor like a single determined engine. She looked up at my somewhat awed face as they passed and twinkled. ‘Two galleons passing through’, she said, and sailed on. – Gawain Towler writing of Anne Widdecombe July 12th, 2026 | 6 comments
Markets are discovery mechanisms. In war adaptation and discovery are a matter of survival. Ukraine began the war with a traditional military procurement system. Large, standardised orders from suppliers chosen by the defence ministry with no room for adjustment to individual circumstances. Ukraine’s key innovation was to decentralise military acquisition, placing the funding and decision-making power in the hands of military commanders on the front lines. Enabled by their earlier implementation of a public electronic procurement system Prozorro, groundbreaking in its own right by allowing greater price competition and transparency, Ukraine launched DOT-Chain Defence in July 2025. Perhaps best described as an ‘Amazon’ for weapons systems, Military units independently select, order, and reserve the necessary equipment, see delivery timelines, leave feedback, and receive quick responses. The system is designed to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy and allow frontline brigades to order in exactly the resources they need at any given time with minimal delay. If a product is low-quality individual units will cease to order it as soon as battlefield conditions expose its flaws, providing rapid feedback to manufacturers to improve their products. The e-points system is another recent deployment. A unit carries out a combat mission and uploads video proof of its achievements, targets destroyed etc., to the DELTA combat and control system. The unit is then awarded e-points at the end of the month, a virtual currency which it can use to purchase the weapons systems of its choice. By introducing clear incentives at every step of the process, combat units are motivated to provide results, manufacturers to improve quality and the Ukrainian military machine becomes ever more effective. July 9th, 2026 | 9 comments
Gawain Towler explains the ongoing campaign by the British establishment to destroy the existential threat The Reform Party poses to them.
If you are even vaguely considering supporting Reform, then you are the target of this carefully orchestrated campaign to convince you to do otherwise. I urge you to read the entire linked article: The Guns Before the Whistle. Thucydides famously observed that “the secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage.” Take courage. July 6th, 2026 | 29 comments
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