The UK’s electricity crisis is not caused by “System Failure”. It’s caused by Net Zero
|
|||||
|
As the i reported, Emily Darlington, Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, ‘is seeking to make the Electoral Commission recommend enhanced DBS checks for candidates and then publish whether or not parties have agreed to the vetting. The aim is to ensure political parties justify whether their candidates are fit for office and name and shame those who refuse to participate.’ This is troubling when one considers that DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks include not just criminal history but ‘non-crime hate incidents’, which may even appear on the records of people who haven’t been contacted by police. These highly-political charges are far more likely to be directed at those with Right-wing opinions. When western European countries do things like this, I try to gauge whether this is normal by asking the question: what if Hungary did this? In most of these cases, I imagine the assessment would be that it was an assault on liberalism and democratic norms. In which case, what if Britain is undergoing the sort of ‘democratic backsliding’ usually levelled at central European countries with conservative governments? What if Keir Starmer is actually one of these illiberal ‘strongmen’ we read about, just not a very effective one. – Ed West January 15th, 2026 | 18 comments
 It is not a victim of the collapse of the ‘rules-based order’, but of its own terrible decisions. The cause of Europe’s shift into blandness and relative economic decline is not mysterious: it has developed into a top-down corporatist bureaucracy, where incumbents and well-connected lobbyists always push for ever more regulation until nimbler challengers do the rational thing and relocate to the United States. It is an awkward model for a continent whose historic edge was the opposite: dispersed power, fierce competition between jurisdictions, and constant pressure to innovate. Too often, the officials presiding over this drift are so far removed from the realities they regulate that, when growth stalls, they cannot talk intelligently about incentives, productivity, or risk-taking. So instead they reach for comforting abstractions about “values” and “leadership”. – Mark Brolin (£) January 10th, 2026 | 5 comments
Keir Starmer is mulling a ban on X, formerly Twitter. This would be a shocking, draconian move, bringing the UK into line with states as authoritarian as Russia, China and North Korea. Yet the only real surprise here is that he hasn’t tried it sooner. As I argue today on spiked, the PM’s claim that this is about protecting children from X-generated AI deepfakes is incredibly weak sauce. Every man and his AI companion knows that X and its owner, Elon Musk, have been a constant thorn in the side of this loathsome Labour government. Starmer holds X responsible for reviving interest in the grooming gangs and even stoking the Southport riots. We should take his threat to ban it incredibly seriously. January 9th, 2026 | 30 comments
For what it is worth, here is an interesting conversation between ChatGPT & my inimitable Misses on the topic of revolutions, Czechoslovak & Iranian… Presented “as is” simply because I think it is fascinating & worth pondering. Read below… — → Continue reading: A ChatGPT discussion about revolutions January 9th, 2026 | 57 comments
The last 48 hours have witnessed a veritable epidemic of FDS, a collective meltdown that would be comical if it weren’t so pathetically predictable. It all stems from a recent poll by Merlin Strategy, a fresh-faced polling outfit helmed by Scarlet Maguire, a former BBC and ITV politics producer who’s built a reputation for sharp, no-nonsense analysis – most recently in a valuable piece in the New Statesman, looking at the way that young women are swinging leftwards.. Their latest survey, commissioned for The Telegraph and dated just before the new year, dropped a bombshell: on balance, Reform UK is more trusted than any other party to run the economy. Yes, you read that right. Not Labour’s hapless crew, still fumbling with their socialist spreadsheets. Not the Tories, whose economic stewardship resembles a drunkard at a casino. But Reform UK, the upstarts led by that perennial thorn in the establishment’s side, Nigel Farage. The numbers, buried in that Excel file of raw data, paint a picture of public disillusionment with the status quo, Reform edging out the competition in net trust scores on economic management. For the FDS sufferers, this was intolerable. Their brains, already addled by years of wishing Farage into obscurity, short-circuited spectacularly. January 8th, 2026 | 30 comments
Some interesting contextualising information from Daniel Di Martino, who is a Venezuelan‑born economist, writer, and activist: January 4th, 2026 | 25 comments
So soon into 2026, I am delighted Maduro is gone… just as I was delighted when Saddam Hussain was overthrown in 2003. Yet in retrospect, I had no idea how unwise successive US governments would be when it came to handling the aftermath in Iraq. Trump says what will follow in Venezuela will not be ‘nation building’ so much as literal direct rule by the USA “until a proper and judicious transition” (whatever that means). Yet is there any indication the US actually has control of Venezuela? To what extent has Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela been dismantled, if at all? One night of air strikes will not have eliminated the regime’s security apparatus. Will there be a Marine Expeditionary Force in Caracas in the next few days? January 4th, 2026 | 23 comments
Bloody hell! I woke up and read a US SpecOp has captured Maduro and flown him out of the country 😀 January 3rd, 2026 | 36 comments
The establishment never sleeps, does it? At the beginning of last year Channel 4, came up with a glossy report dressed up as concern for the youth. “Gen Z: Trends, Truth and Trust,” they called it, a title that drips with the sort of paternalistic sanctimony you’d expect from a broadcaster that’s long been the darling of the liberal elite. Delivered in a keynote speech that was part TED Talk, part sermon, then CEO, and recently gonged Alex Mahon CBE painted a picture of Britain’s young people as lost souls adrift in a sea of misinformation, desperately in need of rescue by surprise, surprise. the very institutions that have spent decades alienating them. What is concerning is that some of her predictions are coming to pass. But let’s not kid ourselves. This isn’t a fair-minded attempt to help Gen Z navigate the news. It’s a brazen power grab, a sly manoeuvre by the modern establishment to control what young people read, watch, and believe. Through a highly sceptical lens, one that sees through the veneer of altruism, this report reeks of desperation. The old guard is panicking because Gen Z isn’t buying their narrative anymore. And why should they? These kids have grown up in a world stacked against them, jobs vanishing to AI, a housing market that’s a sick joke, student debts piled high by a system that promises opportunity but delivers chains. They’re not falling for “fake news”; they’re spotting the real biases in the so-called trusted sources. Mahon’s call? Rein in the wild west of the internet, slap labels on “reliable” content, and let the state play gatekeeper. Freedom of speech? That’s so last century. January 2nd, 2026 | 5 comments
I do not have a good enough grasp of Iran’s internal political and social dynamics to know if this wave of resistance has an real prospect of unseating the ghastly Islamic regime… but that would indeed be a truly wonderous start to 2026 if it was to happen.
January 1st, 2026 | 39 comments
There have been so many criticisms of Mearsheimer that I doubt anyone cares at this point. But I wanted to raise something rarely mentioned: M. is not actually making a realist argument. Which is ironic given how much damage he has done to the realist brand. I’m going to share a secret only political scientists know about. There are actually two John J. Mearsheimers. The first one wrote The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001) and says powerful states are dissatisfied by nature, and will go to war whenever they can. The second one, born in 2014, disagrees. Yes, states go to war because it’s the central feature of political life — except Russia, who goes to war because of American liberals. The first Mearsheimer is a theorist of international anarchy. The second is a moralist of American sin. The two have never met, but if they did they would hate each other. December 31st, 2025 | 21 comments
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
