The response to the Iran-Hezbollah drone attack on Britain’s Royal Air Force Base in Cyprus earlier this month has been revealing. For the first time since 1980, Britain had no warships in the eastern Mediterranean or the Gulf. Air defences were effectively absent. The UK’s main carrier strike group was still en route to Greenland. Britain ended up having to rely on Greece and France to help secure its own military base. That is not evidence of foreign capture. It is evidence of institutional incompetence.
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The truth of course is that ‘Net Zero’ is an article of faith. A state religion masquerading as a moral crusade despite the evidence it is expensive, ineffective, and generally regressive. Low carbon subsidies transfer wealth from the general population to landowners and corporations. It’s state socialism delivering a caricature of pre-Corn Laws Toryism. March 8th, 2026 | 16 comments
 There is far more heat energy in a swimming pool than in a pan of boiling water. You can boil an egg in the pan. You can’t boil an egg in the pool. And if you doubled the size of the pool, you’d double the energy available — and still have a cold, raw egg. This is not a riddle. It is the single most important concept in the energy debate, and almost nobody making energy policy understands it. […] The proposal to replace gas and nuclear with wind and solar reverses the direction of every successful energy transition in human history. It moves down the density ladder, deliberately, and hopes for the best. That is what I mean when I say current energy policy is in a head-on collision with physics. Read the whole thing. March 5th, 2026 | 55 comments
A conservative is actually despairing of finding himself having to call himself ‘conservative’ in the first place. February 26th, 2026 | 2 comments
The basic justification that Lowe’s online supporters offer for abandoning Reform at precisely the moment when they seem poised to destroy not one but both of the established political parties and usher in a government of a new party for the first time in a century is that the party as a whole, and Nigel Farage in particular, cannot be trusted to deliver on the priorities of the right, especially regarding immigration and demographics. […] This is an attitude which plagues the British Right. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Politics is not a game in which the loser receives a consolation prize and a pat on the back. The stakes now are too high. Either we take power, by whatever means, or we’re done for. A future where there is no right-wing government in 2029 looks incredibly bleak. I do not want to risk backing the weaker horse, especially when its policy is practically identical to that of Reform, just because some of its leaders say the words I want to hear more vehemently and care less about the political impact of doing so. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this happened at the precise moment when the path became clear on both sides for Reform to win a victory at the next election. The desire to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is palpable. Read the whole thing. February 25th, 2026 | 21 comments
While you might think free parking in NHS hospitals is a bit of throwaway populist fluff, it still tells you a lot about how populists think. If they do not see the immediate value in administration then it simply shouldn’t exist. We then get some confirmation of how Lowe thinks from an interview with David Starkey. Lowe wants to recruit candidates who are accomplished business leaders (basically people like Rupert Lowe). Regardless of what you think of Lowe’s values (there’s not much I disagree with), the bottom line is that he’s hopelessly naïve and has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. Starkey is right. Politics is not business. Businessmen are often successful because they take risks, and delegate the details to their people. It does not make them experts, and it does not mean their business success is transferrable to politics. Setting things up is a lot different to running things (as Lowe is about to discover). Very often businessmen have very little understanding of the day to day running of their businesses. They hire people to do that for them so they can think about other things. We saw this during Brexit, where the media was asking CEOs how Brexit might affect their businesses, to find they were no more informed about the complexities of EU customs rules than the man in the street. Read the whole thing as it is an interesting practical discussion about allocation of scarce resources February 22nd, 2026 | 38 comments
To be clear, none of this has much to do with actual right-wing or conservative political thought. If you’re wearing tweed and reading Sir Roger Scruton, please carry on. The influencer ecosystem I once inhabited was the Chernobyl-ass Frankenstein of right-wing politics. A radioactive, reanimated corpse stitched together from clout, resentment, and cocaine, which desperately needs to be taken out back and shot for everyone’s good (it’s own included). Unfortunately, monsters are hard to kill February 21st, 2026 | 22 comments
Our judges will bend over backwards to find ways to allow people who ought to be deported to remain, and will connive with charities performing strategic litigation in order to allow this to happen. And their genuflections have become so convoluted that it is almost pointless to try to subject them to careful doctrinal analysis. We simply need to cut to the chase: the problem is not a legal, but a political or even sociological one. It is an issue concerning the makeup of the judiciary itself. Read the whole thing. February 19th, 2026 | 19 comments
The British State did not want Birmingham to be portrayed as a “no go zone” for Jews. Instead they submitted fabricated evidence to the Birmingham Safety Advisory Group to secure the ban. For example, they falsely attributed to Tel Aviv fans actions taken against them by Muslims in the Netherlands at a previous match. They said Israelis had thrown Muslims into canals, when the truth (as subsequently confirmed by Dutch police) was the precise opposite. Dutch Muslims on an organised “Jew Hunt” (their words not mine) had actually committed the violent acts that English Muslims were threatening. West Midlands Police offered no evidence to the authorities about the actual threats. With the usual excuse of potential damage to “community relations”, they falsely portrayed the visitors as the danger. “Community relations” with Britain’s Jews or (still less) Britain’s relations with Israel were not a concern, apparently. Essentially his force was guilty of cowardice. They bowed before a threat of violence. They were too gutless to be honest about it. February 18th, 2026 | 13 comments
Under the Bank Secrecy Act, one of the most common reasons for filing a suspicious activity report (often abbreviated as SAR) is because someone deposited or withdrew nearly $10,000 in cash. That’s all it takes for you to get labeled as “suspicious” in an official report to the government. These reports rarely catch actual criminals. Yet, each report is like a red mark on your banking record, nonetheless. And getting too many of these reports filed on you can quickly spell trouble. If you rack up multiple reports (often as few as three), banks will close the account. The bank might know you are likely innocent, but the risk of regulators punishing them for inaction is too high. Fines for failing to report real criminal activity can reach into the millions. It’s much safer for the bank to close the account than risk fines later, especially if it is a smaller account. February 17th, 2026 | 5 comments
February 16th, 2026 | 23 comments
For the first time anyone can remember, in a contest for a Westminster seat in an English city, the two parties vying for power won’t be Labour or the Conservatives, but instead be two insurgent outsiders. This is a twin-pronged revolt against the political mainstream – against a clique that has become ever more detached and tin-eared since the advent of globalisation in the 1990s. The concerns articulated by both outfits, Reform UK and the Green Party, mirror those seen in all developed countries around the globe. In Reform, we have a party that appeals to small-c conservatives and a disaffected working class who inhabit deindustrialised areas, who feel their homeland has been degraded by an aloof, footloose liberal-left who cares little for them or their country. In the Greens, we have a party that has enjoyed a surge in popularity by taking a sharp turn to the left, appealing to a graduate class for whom the ‘elites’ are instead neoliberal capitalists, who must be humbled through punitive tax hikes. The Greens have remained steadfast passengers on the woke bandwagon, still proud to fly the Progress Pride flag, while simultaneously making gainful overtures to Muslim voters. Time will tell how well that interesting marriage works out. February 14th, 2026 | 14 comments
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