Can a man whose legacy will be full-term abortion, censorship, digital surveillance, and the abolition of trial by jury really claim to have rescued Britain from the moral abyss? Can a man who gave us soaring youth unemployment, who shrugged at farm suicides, who thinks nothing of bankrupting schools for disabled children and religious minorities, really boast of returning to Britain a sense of pride?
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Samizdata quote of the day – The EU produces rules, the US produces companies, China produces scale.Europe has spent decades believing that you can regulate prosperity, tax innovation, and distrust entrepreneurship, while Silicon Valley and Shenzhen built the future. Now, European Commissioner Virkkunen “Spuit11” warns that Europe is dependent on American and Chinese AI for digital security. As if that were a natural disaster. It’s not a natural disaster. It’s policy. The EU produces rules. The US produces companies. China produces scale. Europe produces commissions that explain why we’re falling behind. June 19th, 2026 | 8 comments
 No end to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s government, no end to Iran’s missile programme, no handover of enriched uranium, yes to ending US sanctions and thus forgoing any political leverage, yes to accepting Iranian (and Omani, for what it’s worth) control over Hormuz, no end to the IRGC proxy forces in Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon… and, er, an Iranian promise to be nice in the future and not make nukes? This is not being well received by everyone. Assorted wags have remarked:
and…
It would all be a lot funnier if it was not quite so tragic. June 18th, 2026 | 24 comments
No Government has the right, whether to flatter fanatics or in mere vagueness of mind, to forge an instrument of tyranny and say that it will never be used. – William Butler Yeats, written in 1928 in opposition to censorship legislation in the Irish Free State June 17th, 2026 | 16 comments
There is a never ending number of biscuits, not finite. Socialists think there is a biscuit tin under the bed, everyone has to share, 1 for you, 1 for me. They fail to learn how to make cookies with their granny who thought grandad was talking sh1t. Families 😂😂 June 16th, 2026 | 14 comments
June 15th, 2026 | 39 comments
Sir Keir Starmer is set to announce sweeping reforms tomorrow banning under-16s from 10 major social media platforms, including X, but not the Left-wing platform Bluesky.
June 14th, 2026 | 23 comments
But let us take the question seriously, because it deserves to be. What does it actually mean, to be fit to govern? It is not, I think, what the managerial mind supposes. It is not a glossy CV, nor a safe pair of hands, nor a tidy communications grid. Strip away the cant and ask the question the common Englishman (and our Scots, our Welsh, our Ulstermen will forgive me the shorthand, for the inheritance is theirs every bit as much as ours) has always put, plainly, to anyone who would rule him: what is government actually for? The answer is older than any party in this room, older than this Union itself, this Union, our great Union. It is this. Defend the realm. Keep the peace. Hold the law level over the head of the richest man and the poorest alike. And then, having done those few hard things well, leave us our liberty and our property, and get out of the way. That is the whole of it. That is the inheritance of the common law, the law that stood here before Parliament and will stand here after it, the law that William Blackstone, Oxford’s own, took down out of the air and set in order so that every man and woman in these islands might know their rights. Measured against that standard, fitness to govern is not a question of experience. It is a question of spine. And that is precisely where the parties opposite fail, and Reform does not. For fitness, properly understood, is the willingness to say what you want and to mean it, and to bring with you a team ready to put its shoulder to the national wheel and push. – Gawain Towler giving an absolutely stonking speech. June 12th, 2026 | 17 comments
June 10th, 2026 | 3 comments
Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all. – Signal official statement June 8th, 2026 | 20 comments
Some epic reportage by Caolan Robertson. Highly recommended. June 7th, 2026 | 14 comments
Some note-worthy observations and comparisons in no particular order: – The Pedant-General summarising the situation rather well. To which I would add to anyone saying this horror should not be politicised: the incident is intrinsically political. Why? Because the incident centres not just on the murder itself and murderer’s use of the word-of-power ‘racist‘, but also on the subsequent actions of the police, who responded to that word-of-power as the user intended them to. So, this is all political because the police are the literal enforcers of the state’s will, responding as they have been trained to respond. This is a consequence of decades of establishment policy decisions by both Labour and ‘Conservative’ governments, a product of politically directed institutional police culture. June 4th, 2026 | 69 comments
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