The first lockdown in the UK did not technically have legal force until three days after Johnson’s address. But that didn’t stop police going after people almost immediately. This may sound like a trivial oversight, but it does underscore the authoritarian nature of how lockdown rules were made and imposed. For a brief period at least, police were arresting people on the basis not of laws passed democratically in parliament, but on the mere words of the prime minister, merely because they had been uttered in a television broadcast. This really did bring Britain into ‘police state’ territory.
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Why? How many real-life, off-screen cases of femicide has Tate actually been provably linked with? Not as many as a casual newspaper reader may be led to presume. Andrew didn’t bomb all those little girls to death at the Manchester Arena a few years back, did he? Mere days after Adolescence went up on Netflix, the UK’s counter-terrorism tsar, Robin Simcox, released a report into 100 convicted UK-based terrorists arrested between 2004 and 2021, analysing their “mindset material”, like social media activity. This found that, of the 100 studied, 85 could be classed as Islamists, 14 as ‘far-Right’ (whatever that even is now) and… one as being an incel. Appropriately enough, really, for such a committed breed of professional loners. – Steven Tucker (£) March 24th, 2025 | 11 comments
 In fact, he wasn’t the only one and, lacking Dan’s modesty, I’m happy to name myself as one of the first journalists to oppose the lockdown policy, along with Peter Hitchens, Allison Pearson, Ross Clark, Julia Hartley-Brewer and a handful of others. But Dan is right to emphasise how one-sided the debate was, with almost everyone falling in behind the government. He singles out human-rights lawyers as missing in action, given that this was ‘the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history’ (Jonathan Sumption), and we can add the ‘neo-republican’ political theorists who champion the Roman conception of liberty as self-rule, such as Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit. Both those intellectual giants defended the policy. I thought I could count on the Tufton Street mafia to weigh in on my side – after all, aren’t they wedded to the principle that ‘government is best that governs least’? Surely, paying people not to work, forcing businesses to close and increasing public expenditure by £400 billion was anathema to them? But most of the right-wing policy wonks became enthusiastic supporters of the Covid restrictions, a group I dubbed ‘libertarians for lockdown’. Boris Johnson passed the initial test with flying colours, urging the public to ‘take it on the chin’, but soon fell into lockstep with the more cautious people surrounding him, including my political lodestars Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings. As someone who’d shared foxholes with them during the Brexit wars, that was heartbreaking. March 14th, 2025 | 107 comments
Sometimes the Guardian shows flashes of its old persona as a guardian of liberty. Publishing this article by Apostolis Fotiadis was one example:
The title of this post referred to this story: “Britain’s biggest choir ditches Every Breath You Take over ‘abusive’ lyrics”
January 24th, 2025 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
– Carly Hammond, a Saginaw city councillor and former trade union organiser who campaigned for Kamala Harris, quoted in this Guardian article from 18th January: Democrats in denial over Trump defeat, voters say: ‘Haven’t learned the lessons’ *
– subheading to Guardian article on Donald Trump’s second inauguration, 20th January 2025: Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally January 20th, 2025 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Richard Sennett’s article in the Guardian, “McCarthyism stalked my family. Its paranoia contains a lesson for Trump’s second term” is well titled, but, as usual, the lesson is not the one the Left thinks it is. Professor Sennett’s article treats the Second Red Scare as if it were simply an eruption of irrational hatred. This treatment of the McCarthy era was the standard one when I was young, but feels quaint now. The Venona Project established that when Senator Joe McCarthy claimed that many senior people in the American federal government were Soviet agents, he was right. The link takes you to a 2015 post by Patrick Crozier that I recommend you read. I also recommend you read Niall Kilmartin’s comment – McCarthy was right, but he was not a nice man. Professor Sennett is correct to say this about how McCarthy and Roy Cohn chose their targets:
“They attacked public figures often arbitrarily, but if they met with resolute resistance, they tended to move on and find other targets.” Well observed mate, but you didn’t have to wait until the eve of Trump’s second term before making the parallel. Trump did nothing McCarthyite when he was president the first time, and I see no good reason to suppose he will be any different when he becomes president a second time. Professor Sennett, where were you in 2020 when your observations about how political witch-hunts work might have helped people who actually were being targeted in the same way as your parents were? What you are describing – the orgiastic yet opportunistic denunciations of individuals, with their degree of guilt a secondary consideration; the digging up of long-abandoned political flirtations; the way that apologies only excite the mob further – that is not Trumpism. That is Wokism. December 28th, 2024 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just not in the way the Guardian thinks.
What form did the “manipulation of the vote” by these cyber-attacks take? One would think the Guardian’s leader-writer would be clearer on this point. If it was something like changing the tallies on voting machines (I do not know if Romania even has voting machines), that absolutely would be illicit manipulation of the vote. No doubt Vladimir Putin would be delighted to literally falsify the numbers of votes cast for candidates in the Romanian election if he could, but did he? Give us evidence, or I am going to assume that these alleged cyber-attacks are of a piece with the 25,000 fake TikTok accounts – that is, not attacks at all, just the issuance of propaganda. As I have frequently said, Vladimir Putin belongs at the end of a rope. But that is because he is a mass-murderer, not because he gets a bunch of drudges and bots to say words on the internet. When I was a kid, I used to turn the dial of our family’s radio to “Moscow” quite often. Radio Moscow wasn’t as good – by which I mean it wasn’t as bad – as Radio Tirana, whose announcer would say “Good night, dear listeners” in a strange voice eerily reminiscent of the evil Dr Crow in Carry On Spying, who I have just found out after half a century was not played by Hattie Jacques but by Judith Furse, only voiced by John Bluthal in order to sound more asexual. (The character is meant to be the forerunner of a race of artificially created superior beings who have gone beyond being male or female.) Neither the supervillainesque lady in Albania or the main Russian presenter, whose English accent was eerily good, had much luck in turning me communist. But I always thought that one of the things that made the UK a democracy was that I was perfectly free to turn the dial to Tirana or Moscow and let them try. December 10th, 2024 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
I saw this comment by Paul Marks to the previous post and thought, “This is huge. Why isn’t this story the main headline on every news outlet?” It is being reported, somewhat less prominently than the Princess of Wales going to a carol concert. Heartwarming though that is, I would have thought that the fact that a Romanian court has annulled the first round of their presidential election because the Russians allegedly “ran a coordinated online campaign to promote the far-right outsider who won the first round” was bigger news. So what if they did? Where did this idea come from that the people of a country are not allowed to watch, read or listen to foreigners attempting to persuade them how to vote? Well, certain foreigners at least – those who promote this information Juche never seem to have a problem with the European Union’s taxpayer-funded propagation of its opinion. December 6th, 2024 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
And not just “on the agenda” in general, on today’s agenda at the European Council, “where national ministers from each EU country meet to negotiate and adopt EU laws”. They never give up, and with “they” being the European Union, they only have to win once. Tech Radar reports,
That’s today, kids.
December 6th, 2024 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
I did not see this coming: “South Korea’s president declares emergency martial law”, reports the BBC. Yoon Suk Yeol, the South Korean president, is quoted as saying, “Our National Assembly has become a haven for criminals, a den of legislative dictatorship that seeks to paralyse the judicial and administrative systems and overturn our liberal democratic order.” Sounds like projection to me. Can anyone explain what is going on? Is there really any more of a threat from North Korea than there always is, or is it all to do with domestic politics? Update: Lawmakers in South Korea vote to lift the martial law decree. The Guardian link says,
Much depends on which 190 lawmakers were present. If the very fact that they were still in the parliament building after martial law was declared was because they they were from the opposition, President Yoon will dismiss it – although the 190 being an absolute majority of South Korea’s MPs does give their vote moral weight. If it was a broad spread of MPs from several parties, this vote might mean the end of the coup. Either way, it is troubling to realise that a country that everyone thought was a stable democracy isn’t. Did democracy stop being cool or something? December 3rd, 2024 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Progressives and Left-wingers in the UK have gone right off “Vox populi, vox Dei”. The Brexit vote was the last straw. Every time I try to think of a first straw – Essex Man voting for Thatcher? – an earlier one pops into my head. Maybe, as we discussed last week, the British Left’s long turn away from reverence for the views of the populace goes right back to the popular conservatism of the Primrose League. In itself, this cessation of reverence is probably a good thing. Whatsoever, for any cause, (Relax, delatores, it’s only a poem.) The sort of progressives who have reluctantly had to say, “The people have spoken, the bastards” do fewer terrible things than the sort of progressives who still think their will and the will of the people are one and the same. But although the voice of the people-in-general is no longer sacred to British progressives, the voices of some people still are. Which people? Being from an ethnic minority certainly helps to gain entrance into the category of persons who must be listened to with reverence, even if enough black and brown-skinned British people have followed in the footsteps of Essex Man (including the Essex MP who leads the Conservative Party) that skin colour no longer works on its own. However, being an ethnic minority and a socialist is a qualification, and being a Muslim Labour MP lets you say practically anything without fear of contradiction. Why, you can cheerfully propose to reverse one of the proudest achievements of the previous Labour government, and the leader of the present Labour government will spray out deliberately-ambiguous words in response that pointedly do not include the word “No.” Yesterday’s Hansard records that Tahir Ali, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Mosely, put the following Parliamentary Question to the Prime Minister and received the following reply:
A video of the exchange can be seen here. Wikipedia claims that “The common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel were formally abolished in England and Wales in 2008 and Scotland in 2024.” The laws concerned had been dead-letter laws for some time before that, but their final extinction in England and Wales under Gordon Brown’s premiership was actually accomplished by means of an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill 2008 put forward by the Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris. There was little serious opposition, even from the Established Church. For instance, the Bishop of Oxford said,
That, and more importantly the fact that such laws directly contradict the teaching and example of Jesus, was why I and many other Christians welcomed the end of the offence of blasphemy. I must admit that when the new age of toleration dawned in 2008, I was expecting a gap before it dusked, if that is a word, of longer than fourteen years in England and Wales and, er, zero years in Scotland. Because dusked it has. Blasphemy against the Muslim religion is already effectively illegal in the UK, and has been for some time. As reported by the BBC, “A religious studies teacher at Batley Grammar School was forced into hiding in 2021 after showing a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad during a class.” He is still in hiding. There are other similar cases. Defenders of Sir Keir argue that his two-faced waffle in response to Tahir Ali’s question was just him trying to keep two factions of his own party on side – in other words they celebrate his evasiveness as a clever move. But when the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has to resort to deception in order to avoid saying “No, we will not reintroduce a law against blasphemy”, darkness has already fallen. November 28th, 2024 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Daniel Ortega, remember him? Ortega was one of the leaders of the Nicaraguan Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, FSLN) that overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, thus ending 43 years of rule of Nicaragua by the Somoza dynasty. For a while Sandinista rule in Nicaragua was popular at home and admired worldwide. A often-repeated line from left wing sources was that its success represented “the threat of a good example”, the good example being of a country thriving despite the opposition of the United States, which had supported Somoza, as it did many right-wing dictators in Latin America. The admirers included teenage me. Not that I followed every twist and turn of Nicaragua’s politics, but, at first, it all sounded good. Land reform. Education. Healthcare. If I had known then what I know now “price fixing for commodities of basic necessity” might have told me what was coming, but I did not know then what I know now. Several years went by and a few discordant notes started to spoil the chorus of praise. The forcible ejection from their ancestral lands of the Miskito Indigenous people (at that time everyone, even the Guardian, called them “the Miskito Indians”) was one ugly incident that I remember noticing. This Time article from 1983, “Nicaragua: New Regime, Old Methods” gives many other examples of Sandinista human rights abuses. That said, the Sandinista National Liberation Front of that era under the leadership of Daniel Ortega still had enough decency left to hold an election and, having lost it, leave. I will spare you a blow by blow account of Nicaraguan history from 1990 to the present day. You can read Wikipedia as well as I can. Suffice to say that half a lifetime later the reference books once again list the Sandinista National Liberation Front as the ruling party of Nicaragua and Daniel Ortega as its leader, and this time he has no plans to ever leave. “Nicaragua: Ortega and wife to assume absolute power after changes approved”, the Guardian sorrowfully reports.
* One of the Tintin books – remind me which – starts and ends with a picture of a couple of thuggish cops patrolling a shanty town. The only significant difference between the two scenes is that the party symbol on the police uniforms has changed. Update: Thank you JJM, who supplied the name of the book. It was Tintin and the Picaros. ¡Viva [
November 23rd, 2024 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
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