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That is not how wealth works of course. The people who have piles of money do not in fact have piles of money they’ve got piles of paper signifying ownership of companies and businesses. Which leads to the third problem with the idea. Which is that taxing these billionaires on their stacks of ownership of assets does not, in fact, free up money into the economy. It doesn’t reverse hoarding that is – just changes who hoards. December 5th, 2025 | 16 comments
 What Putin understands – and what Britain refuses to face – is that Europe is vulnerable in ways that matter more than tanks or troop numbers. Russia’s president does not need to defeat Nato militarily to cause chaos. As he has already shown through repeated greyzone attacks, Europe’s power grids, subsea cables, energy systems and communications networks offer targets far easier to strike, far harder to defend and politically far more disruptive. Putin’s warning this week was a reminder that Russia knows exactly where our exposed nerves lie. – Sam Olsen (£) December 4th, 2025 | 25 comments
‘The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage’, Andrew Marr informed the Independent in 2008. ‘It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don’t have access to politicians, who don’t have easy access to official documents, who aren’t able to buttonhole people in power.’ At the Cheltenham Literary Festival two years later, he was dismissing these online upstarts as ‘socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people.’ And there’s more: ‘So-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.’ But the media world is changing. In the US, major networks are looking to online media for a lead as ratings for legacy media decline. CBS has enlisted Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, a few short years after she was bullied out of the New York Times before she slowly built up a multi-million dollar online empire with the Free Press. Some BBC stalwarts have, like Marr, perhaps seen where things are heading, and jumped ship to be free to express their old ideas on new media. Emily Maitlis and John Sopel created the News Agents podcast for this purpose. Oxbridge-educated Maitlis now doubles down on the smug but deluded sense of class-based superiority that has become her stock-in-trade. Never has she seemed more out of place as when she deigned to take her podcast to Clacton on the eve of the General Election last year. Nigel Farage is now Clacton’s MP. – Michael Collins with an absolutely stonking article on Spiked December 1st, 2025 | 22 comments
I strongly recommend this article by Gawain Towler about the unedifying case of traitor Nathan Gill. November 25th, 2025 | 13 comments
Cash savings are not dead money – they’re the deposits that finance the banks’ loan books. Tossery built upon ignorance. Richard Murphy – that Sage of Ely – is one of the few people in the country able to proffer up budget ideas even worse than the ones we’re going to get from Rachel this week. November 24th, 2025 | 11 comments
This cult of safety has risen inexorably alongside the bloated state, the proliferation of lanyards dangling from corporate necks like talismans or morality nooses, – I mean look at us here, at the Margaret Thatcher Centre all proudly wearing our own blue ropes – and the insidious creep of human resources culture. HR departments, those modern inquisitors, enforce “safe spaces” where dissent is heresy, and risk assessments stifle innovation and free speech goes to die. It’s a world where playgrounds are padded to absurdity, and employees are trained not in skills, but in avoiding offence. This isn’t safeguarding; it’s societal strangulation, a slow garrote on the British spirit. November 22nd, 2025 | 12 comments
We’re told that students perform better when exposed to “different formats”. This is fair enough in principle, though the guidelines decline to specify what these formats might be, beyond implying there will be an impressive number of them. One can already picture the future: a single course requiring essays, posters, podcasts, puppet shows and a short stop-motion film made from Play-Doh – each designed to develop the student’s confidence, creativity and capacity to perform self-expression in increasingly unhinged ways. Next, the document warns that “Standard Academic English” (once known as “English”) is an oppressive tool that advantages “already privileged students”. The implication, apparently, is that requiring coherent writing is a form of violence. This is the educational equivalent of a gym announcing that push-ups are discriminatory because they favour those with upper-body strength. November 20th, 2025 | 6 comments
In a series of reports, I have shown that the European Union already operates a vast propaganda and censorship apparatus that spans every level of civil society — NGOs, think tanks, the media and even academia. The cornerstone of this system is a network of EU-funded programmes — notably CERV (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values), Creative Europe and the Jean Monnet initiative — that collectively funnel billions of euros into organisations that are, in theory, “independent” but are in fact deeply enmeshed in the Brussels machine. November 15th, 2025 | 8 comments
That is certainly one way of putting it. Another is that, first, the Trump stuff is much less important than the BBC’s issues in other areas and that it seems modestly significant that Goodall devotes almost no space at all in his lengthy Substack piece to any of those issues. Secondly, at no point does Goodall bother considering whether some or any of the criticisms made by Prescott and Grossman have any validity at all. That, however, seems a necessary starting point. News judgement is often a nuanced and complex business. News “values”, on the other hand, should be comparatively straightforward. This is where it is entirely reasonable to convict the BBC’s coverage of the sex & gender wars. For here the corporation largely – though with notable exceptions, especially Hannah Barnes on Newsnight – picked a side and chose the one that required BBC journalists to sacrifice their judgement. Ideology trumped basic news values. They said it was dry when in fact it wasn’t obviously dry at all. For once again, among the most important of those values is this eternal question: Is This True? There is blood in the water and the sharks are circling. This story is going to run and run and run 😀 November 12th, 2025 | 17 comments
As for its content, Simpson’s post summed up the BBC on several levels. Firstly, that its most senior journalists are simply unable to see the world as ordinary people see it. Politically motivated attack? Mate, the BBC literally edited footage. This was no innocent error; as Janet Daley put it, this was “a professionally crafted editing job which has to have been designed to produce a calculated effect for a political purpose”. Your bleating is only making it worse. Secondly, that the BBC considers a Left-of-centre worldview to be the definition of objectivity. The Guardian is its ideological ally because both assume they are the privileged holders of sanity, grown-up thinking and the truth, which must be defended against the fascist hordes. When the chips are down, the BBC won’t even bother to hide it. Thirdly, that any criticism of the broadcaster represents a bad-faith attempt to destroy a great socialist project that aims to redistribute the news to each according to his needs. Here lies the kicker: in pushing such a conspiratorial Leftist worldview, the doughty journalists of the BBC have apparently dispensed with the need for evidence. – Jake Wallis Simons (£) November 11th, 2025 | 20 comments
Now, zoom out to the regulatory burden, a beast fed by both parties. The Tories kicked it off with gusto. In 2015, George Osborne slashed mortgage interest relief, fully phasing it out by 2020, landlords could no longer deduct full interest from taxable income, effectively hiking taxes by up to 20% for higher-rate payers. Add the 2016 3% stamp duty land tax (SDLT) surcharge on buy-to-lets, which cooled purchases by 10-15% per industry estimates. EPC rules tightened too: from 2018, rentals needed at least an E rating, with fines for non-compliance; by 2025, proposals aimed for C by 2030, costing landlords £8,000-£15,000 per property in upgrades. Right to Rent, introduced in 2014 and expanded, mandated immigration checks with £3,000 fines per illegal tenant. The 2019 promise to scrap Section 21 evictions lingered unresolved until Labour grabbed the baton, but it fuelled uncertainty, prompting a landlord sell-off wave. Labour, far from easing the pain, has doubled down. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025, royal assent in October, bans Section 21 outright (implementation mid-2026), mandates periodic tenancies, and limits rent hikes to once yearly at market rates—with challenges via tribunals. Pets can’t be unreasonably refused, and bidding wars are outlawed. Selective licensing proliferates: councils like Southwark charge £600-£750 per property for five years, with paperwork galore. Fines for breaches? Up to £30,000, as Reeves learned. Right to Rent enforcement has “rocketed” under Labour, with penalties hitting £4.2m recently versus £596k pre-election, a 600%+ spike, per Home Office data. No wonder a 2025 Landlord Today survey cited “political pressure” as a top exit reason for 40% of landlords. Impacts? Catastrophic for small players. October 31st, 2025 | 16 comments
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