The UK’s electricity crisis is not caused by “System Failure”. It’s caused by Net Zero
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January 21st, 2026 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times. “Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do.” – Shabana Mahmood (£), Britain’s Home Secretary, explicitly states she wants to turn the country into a panopticon, quite literally a prison. Jeremy Bentham, an 18th-century philosopher and social theorist, promoted the Panopticon as a circular prison with a central inspection tower from which a single guard could observe all inmates all the time while unseen.
January 20th, 2026 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Britain is also eerily emulating a pattern of democratic backsliding; from India to Mexico, authoritarian governments “test-drive” what they can get away with at local level first. By conveniently delaying elections at a time when council tax is set to rise, Labour risks setting a wicked precedent for “taxation without representation”. – Sherelle Jacobs, Daily Telegraph (£). January 18th, 2026 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
I can’t kid myself any more. The party hasn’t changed… and it won’t. The bulk of the party don’t get it. Don’t have the stomach for the radical change this country needs. In opposition, it’s easy to paper over these cracks, but the divisions – the delusions – are still there. And if we don’t get the next Government right, Britain will likely slip beyond the point of repair. Everything is on this. I cannot, in good conscience, stick with a party that’s failed so badly, that isn’t sorry and hasn’t changed. That I know in my heart won’t… can’t… deliver what’s needed. That’s why I resolved to leave. January 17th, 2026 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
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 - (Comments are closed)
Nick Timothy writes in the Telegraph:
In modern times, the British social contract was meant to be that we, the people, give up the right to use force to protect ourselves in exchange for the police protecting us. Cue Libertarian grumbling “I do not recall signing this contract”, but that is the Britain we used to live in. It wasn’t ideal but it wasn’t bad either. It was one of the better societies that have ever existed. The social contract relied on the idea that the only people permitted to arm themselves were servants of the state such as police officers or soldiers. If the state got wind that members of any other group – a white nationalist militia for example – were preparing to arm themselves in order to attack their enemies, an armed response unit would be kicking down their doors faster than you can say “Terrorism Act 2000”. Now that some sections of the police have acquiesced in other groups taking the right to arm themselves, and, worse yet, have covered up their shame by portraying the aggressors as victims and vice versa, what reason do we have to continue to grant them special status as the sole holders of the right and responsibility to bear arms? Without the majestic aura of the law around them, the police are just another gang. They are not even the dominant gang. January 14th, 2026 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
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 - (Comments are closed)
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 - (Comments are closed)
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 - (Comments are closed)
“Aborting baby girls proves Britain’s multiculturalism experiment has failed”, writes ex-Guardian writer Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph:
Later in the article she gives her own view:
I do not see any good reason for the scare quotes Suzanne Moore put around the word “tradition”. A tradition of which Suzanne Moore disapproves is still a tradition. Nor do I see any good reason for her saying “this is not about choice”. It quite obviously is about choice. Unlike Ms Moore, I am closer to being “pro-life” than “pro-choice”. Here’s an old post of mine that talks about that. I do not agree with the view that the question is simply one of a woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body; there is another life involved. The exact weight to give the competing rights of the foetus depend on a lot of factors, primarily how developed – how far from being a clump of cells and how near to being unquestionably a baby – the foetus is, but also including other factors such as the risk to the mother and whether the foetus is developing normally. However if one grants that a woman’s right to choose abortion does override the foetus’s right to life in particular circumstances, then the nature of a right to do something is that the person with that right does not need the approval of others to do that thing. Putting it another way, how can it be justified that a female foetus that is solemnly decreed not to have a right to life suddenly gains that right if the woman wants to abort because of sexist tradition? Does that still work if the foetus is male and the woman wants to abort it because she’s a radical feminist? December 31st, 2025 | 46 comments - (Comments are closed)
Starmer’s commitment to universal human rights – which necessarily implies open borders – is now a threat to national security and, paradoxically, the human rights of the British people. By welcoming el-Fattah, a virulent anti-Semite, Starmer has violated the right of our Jewish community to feel secure in their own land. His refusal to police the pro-Palestinian, anti-Semitic hate marchers since October 2023 has also trampled on the security of British Jews and infringed upon their liberty – Central London has become a no-go zone. December 30th, 2025 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Our speech laws are bad enough. But at least they can, in theory, be repealed and amended by members of parliament. NCHIs, by contrast, just bubbled up out of the policing quangocracy. No law was ever passed instructing the police to waste their time like this. But on and on they’ve gone, for more than a decade now. December 29th, 2025 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
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