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.
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June 14th, 2026 | 23 comments
 The huge influxes of research funding for compliant scientists have made it difficult to oppose the fable of a threatened planet. Any scientist who speaks up against the cacophony of nonsense about a climate threat is treated like Dr Thomas Stockmann in Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People. Rather than being thanked for discovering that the water of his town’s popular spa is contaminated with deadly disease organisms, Dr Stockman and his family are viciously ostracised by most of the town’s citizens, who are making a good living by promoting the supposed health benefits of the spa. Climate nonsense will eventually end and will be dumped onto the ash heap of history where it belongs. But the longer the cult goes on, the more damage is done. We should all do what we can to stop the madness as soon as possible. June 13th, 2026 | 12 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
Our leaders usually condemn the disorder and violence that follows, but will refuse to discuss the triggers in any depth. Anyone who asks what can be done about horrors like that inflicted on Stephen Ogilvie will be accused of stoking division, exploiting a tragedy and courting the far right. But something can and must be done. It is simply no longer sustainable to force working-class communities to endure such levels of terror, to bear the brunt of the elites’ open-door experiment – to pay the ‘blood price’, as Brendan O’Neill describes it, of the establishment’s virtue-signalling. Practically every day brings new horrors that ordinary folk are simply expected to put up with. On the very same day as the Sudanese suspect was charged with attempted murder, four Afghan nationals appeared in court, all charged with the alleged rape of a Bristol schoolgirl. From gang rapes in Brighton and grooming gangs in Norwich to child rape in Warwickshire, countless British citizens continue to suffer at the hands of men who shouldn’t be here. Yet this barely seems to trouble our cloistered political class. June 10th, 2026 | 35 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 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
“When one your tribe is murdered, I call for calm and unity because that is according to your principles; when one of my tribe is murdered, I call for protests and riots because that is according to my principles.” – Alice Smith on the stark difference between reactions to the deaths of Henry Novak and George Floyd. She’s paraphrasing Frank Herbert. But tell me, there’s no “National White Police Association” in the UK, so why is there a “National Black Police Association” and a “National Association of Muslim Police” in the UK? June 3rd, 2026 | 37 comments
A poll showing Reform ahead of Labour among trade unionists is being treated as a bombshell. It should have been obvious to anyone paying attention. Anyone, that is, except the union leadership. […] Danny Kruger understood this before most. His public conversations with the leadership of the PCS and the National Education Union, in which he made perfectly plain to them that a Reform government would not be conducting its relationships with the civil service unions on the terms to which they had become accustomed. A Reform Government will not be bullied, and will apply the law. As we can now see he was directing his comments to people whose members, in significant numbers, might well vote for him. The officers sit there with their lanyards and their institutional memories and their absolute confidence that the working class would do as it was directed. The members, meanwhile, were doing something else entirely. This is the structural problem that no amount of emergency press releases will solve. The union movement in Britain has, over the course of a generation, undergone a quiet transformation that its leadership has been careful not to notice. The headquarters of the major unions are populated, to a remarkable degree, by people who have spent their entire careers in the union movement. Many went straight from university to a union research department or political officer role and have not left. They are committed, intelligent, and hardworking. They are also, by inclination, temperament, and life experience, entirely disconnected from the people they purport to represent. – Gawain Towler, who really has been blogging up a storm lately over on Fainting in Coils June 1st, 2026 | 10 comments
Against this, the Restore case. Their central claim, repeated by Rupert Lowe and echoed across social media by his more vigorous supporters, is that all Labour figures are the same, Reform and the Tories are essentially equivalent: that it is all the uniparty, that there is nothing meaningfully to choose between them. I have to say, with respect, that this is patently and provably untrue. Reform’s record in local government, its positions on immigration, on Net Zero, on civil liberties, on the democratic accountability of public institutions, represents a genuine and substantive break from the political consensus of the last thirty years. One may argue about pace, emphasis, internal culture. One may not, in good conscience, argue that there is no difference between a party committed to rolling back mass illegal immigration and a party that presided over it. May 29th, 2026 | 25 comments
“If everybody must be equally well-off all the time, there can be no significant movement up or down. That would rule out what might be seen as a natural trajectory from less successful to more successful, or from early struggle to affluent independence, perhaps involving personal resourcefulness or a climb up a professional ladder.” And: “Personal achievement and self-improvement are among the greatest satisfactions life has to offer. The possibility of moral agency and the scope for taking individual responsibility are probably the defining attributes of emotional maturity.” – Janet Daley, Sunday Telegraph. May 26th, 2026 | 15 comments
We have, of course, been laughing at this for decades. ‘Yes Minister’ is regarded as perhaps the finest British sitcom ever made precisely because it is devastatingly accurate. Sir Humphrey is not a caricature; he is a documentary subject lightly fictionalised. ‘The Thick of It’ is funnier and darker, but its portrait of an institution that treats elected politicians as an irritating management layer to be managed, delayed, and where possible redirected is not satire but observation. The reason these programmes land is that everyone who has encountered Whitehall at close quarters recognises the creature. Kruger’s diagnosis of the structural problem is precise. The Cabinet Office, created in 1916 to manage Cabinet business, has since Tony Blair expanded nearly five fold to employ over 11,000 staff, becoming the principal source of authority across Whitehall, to the point that 10 Downing Street appears on the official organogram as a subsidiary unit of the Cabinet Office, listed alongside the Office for Veterans’ Affairs and the Public Inquiry Response Unit. The Prime Minister’s office, in other words, is officially a sub-department of the bureaucracy it nominally directs. If you wanted to design a system that maximised the power of unelected officials relative to elected ministers, you could scarcely do better. The solution proposed is radical but coherent: abolish the Cabinet Office entirely, replace it with an Office of the Prime Minister led by a powerful Chief of Staff appointed directly by the PM, and a new Department of the Civil Service charged with headcount reduction, AI adoption, and transforming Whitehall’s culture and productivity. Ministers would gain real powers to hire and fire civil servants, including their Permanent Secretaries. Quangos would be brought back into departments or scrapped. The model draws on serious international precedents: Australia’s combined Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, which coordinates the whole of government with only 1,000 officials, and Japan’s 2001 reforms, which reduced the number of departments from 22 to 12 after career civil servants had begun running their departments as independent operations, effectively ignoring the Prime Minister’s agenda. There will be much pearl-clutching. May 24th, 2026 | 18 comments
May 21st, 2026 | 6 comments
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