Another year over, and a new one just begun

Wrong Side of Newsletter #72

Good morning, and welcome to the last Wrong Side of History of 2025. Thank you for your support throughout the year, for subscribing, sharing, restacking and recommending (and for paying, obviously).

This has been declared the Year of Slop, and on a global scale it proved to be the moment when AI - and concern about AI - reached a sort of tipping point (certainly for many writers). In my corner of the world, however, 2025 was the year when a long-established political consensus collapsed. Back in September last year I predicted that Reform would at some point top an opinion poll, and it came to pass in February, from which they have not looked back. The post-1997 settlement has reached the same point of exhaustion as the post-war consensus had by the mid-1970s.

The year began with a renewed focus on the grooming gangs, spurred by Elon Musk’s interest in the story. The sheer scale of the atrocity, and the response of the authorities, soon led to comparisons with Chernobyl, and I’m not sure there’s any way back after such a system failure, in part because the old media has lost its monopoly.

In February I visited Germany, a country in as much of a mess as Britain, and also saw Dresden for the first time. I also wrote about my travels in Vietnam, finished my mini-series on Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, and started three others, on the cultural revolution coming full circle, the Black Death and Britain’s age of terrorism (all of which I will come back to.) I spoke at the Now and England Conference in the summer, and also travelled to the United States in the autumn - 2026 is going to be a bigly year for the Great Satan, so inshallah I will return.

Technology indistinguishable from magic, 2025

Last December 31 I ended the year with a list of medical breakthroughs and there has been more good news over the past 12 months. Among them:

Korean researchers developed a new technology to treat cancer cells by turning them ‘normal’ again.

New drugs that can reduce one of the main causes of heart disease and strokes are in trials right now.

A baby in Philadelphia became the first human to be healed with personalised gene-editing treatment.

An extremely effective, twice-yearly HIV preventative called Lenacapavir was given approval. Seven people who received stem cell transplants have also been cured of the virus.

Scientists are turning the herpes virus into a cure for multiple cancers.

Immunotherapy has hugely increased survival rates among cancer sufferers.

Scientists in Cambridge developed material that treats inflammation in arthritis patients.

The first anti-aging pill for dogs was approved.

Huntingdon’s has been treated for the first time (among other breakthroughs listed here).

If you want to read more about the subject of humanity’s relentless strides towards progress, the brilliant Saloni Dattani has also compiled a round-up.

As many of you will know, I’m a techno-optimist and cultural pessimist, so more and more people will live long and healthy lives - they will just spend those lives staring at slop on their phones, rather than reading books. This is why we plan to scale up the Canon Club this coming year, with far more events planned.

On that subject, I look forward to James Marriott’s upcoming book on how no one reads books anymore. Will it be available on audiobook, I wonder? Or maybe a series of 40-second TikTok shorts?

Books

It seems the custom to end the year with a list of favourite books, and among those I enjoyed in 2025 were Ian Leslie’s John and Paul, and the Primate Myth by Jonathan Leaf

I also read and recommend Mary Lovell’s Bess of Hardwick, Ritchie Robertson’s The Enlightenment, James Belich’s The World The Plague Made and Strangers and Intimates by Tiffany Jenkins. There was also Andrew Hussey’s Fractured France - my review will come out next week - and R. R. Reno’s Return of the Strong Gods. I also finished Lee Kuan Yew’s glorious From Third World To First, which should be mandatory reading for everyone in politics. I should also mention A Counter History of French Colonisation by Driss Ghali. Ghali is a French-Moroccan academic I saw giving a talk in Paris last year: he is a compelling speaker, as well as a fascinating and independent-minded thinker and writer, and I’m surprised that he hasn’t yet broken out in the English-speaking world; a review of his book will also come soon.

I’m currently reading Nellie Bowles’ Morning After the Revolution, which is as good as all the reviews say. I’ve been chuckling at the extracts where a bunch of women go through racial struggle sessions and get berated for their whiteness.

Emma, from San Francisco, goes next. She is already crying. “I’m here because I’m a racist. I’m here because my body has a trauma response to my own whiteness and other people’s whiteness.”

Nora, who works in nonprofits, is struggling to overcome her own skepticism. “Some of my natural reactions are kind of instinctively skeptical.” Our facilitator picks up on that: How does that skepticism show up? Nora continues: “Wanting to say, ‘Prove it. Are we sure that racism is the explanation for everything?’” She gets nervous. Her anxiety and tension here is good, our facilitator says. It’s OK. It’s good to get to the edge of honesty and vulnerability. It’s OK to get to the point where you almost want to throw up. “It’s really an important gauge, an edginess of honesty and vulnerability-like where it kind of makes you want to throw up,” our facilitator says.

Claire loves nature and works in student services. She feels “perpetual shame” that she isn’t doing enough. She lists her perfectionism and fear of conflict. But she’s woken up recently to her whiteness. The trouble is now she feels paralyzed. But she knows her silence also makes her complicit. Another woman is tearing up. She is a diversity, equity, and inclusion manager at a consulting firm. She struggles with how to help people of color but also how not to take up space as a white person. It’s a pickle, having to center whiteness and decenter whiteness at the same time.

I genuinely find it hard to get inside the head of someone who would feel like this.

Catch-up service

Recently I wrote about why I hate the UK. Incidentally I’ve long been an advocate for renaming the UK Space Agency the ‘Royal Space Agency’, and I think I may have coined the phrase back in my days at Telegraph Blogs. (I say ‘coined the phrase’ - it hasn’t taken off at all.)

I also wrote about the heroes of terrorism, the one bit of light that emerged out of the horror on Bondi Beach.

In a more optimistic frame of mind, I suggested that driverless cars are going to hugely improve our lives. People will still drive, of course, but having the option of not driving will be a tremendous relief.

A most Starmeresque farce

The year ended with a quintessentially 2025 British story, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his cabinet team all announcing the release of blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah from an Egyptian jail into the warm embrace of his homeland of convenience, Britain. None of them seemed to have done any research on the man in question, who is well known for expressing extreme and violent views and for having open hostility towards the British and white people more generally – until he needed a passport.

Sohrab Ahmari wrote that

The resulting fiasco is an unanswerable indictment of the entire human-rights apparatus and worldview. Which is to say, it’s an indictment of the world that gave birth to Starmer’s career. But El-Fattah’s history should not have come as a surprise. In the autumn of 2014, when I was working as a London-based editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, the European Parliament’s United Left-Nordic Green Left bloc nominated El-Fattah for the Sakharov Prize, named after the Soviet physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner. I knew of El-Fattah by reputation, having researched the Arab dissident for an anthology I edited on the Arab Spring. El-Fattah for the Sakharov Prize? That was moral madness.

This, despite the man’s manifest hatred for his adopted land. He has repeatedly referred to the British as “dogs and monkeys”, for example, and urged Londoners to burn Downing Street. He has “joked” about taking over towns and “rap[ing] ur women” — just the sort of thing British social cohesion needs amid the backlash over migrant hotels and grooming gangs. And he’s called for killing all police, “hating white people”, and the “random shooting of white males”.

Much milder rhetoric than El-Fattah’s can get native-born Britons prosecuted and sometimes jailed by their government. That the same government would fight for El-Fattah, and even celebrate him, is intolerable. It renders the reality of two-tier treatment crystal clear.

The whole thing is totally bizarre, and points to the deep malaise within the British system. Starmer’s government will spend huge amount of political capital trying to free a foreigner who has shown open contempt for Britain, and whose link to our country is tenuous. And for what end? Because it’s a system of rights, run entirely for the benefit of lawyers, aimed at creating a ‘needs-based society’.

It’s also odd that no one in the government had the wit to check his social media profile, nor get it deleted, before making a big song and dance about his release. What is most Yookayesque about the whole thing is we’re determined to rescue him from prison when his tweets would in theory land him in jail here too (I don’t think he would actually be jailed for those tweets in Britain, because the law is clearly selective about who gets punished). It also comes down to one of the central debates that has dominated 2025, of what makes someone British; as with many things in a liberal society, a polite fiction was able to work until pushed to an absurd logical conclusion, pushing people into more hardline positions that reject ambiguity.

For the 98%

Iain Mansfield wrote a piece that made me want to slam down by laptop, crying out ‘this is what we believe’.

In today’s Britain, through a combination of well-meaning policies, statutory obligations and human rights commitments, we have created categories of people who are automatically jumped to the front of the queue, and upon whom arbitrarily large amounts of money must be spent to meet their perceived ‘needs’ must be spent - regardless of how much there is in the budget, or the needs of the majority. The result is an increasing strain upon the working majority, whether in the form of higher taxes, reduced household incomes or the steady degradation of the public realm.

Anyone with a child in a comprehensive school will recognise this problem: everything is shaped around the worst behaved 5 per cent, and so the lives of the 95 per cent, and their education, are far worse as a result. The main advantage of private school is not the teachers, facilities or even connections, but that they’re not held hostage by disruptive troublemakers who can’t easily be removed. That’s the reason why, unlike every comp, private schools don’t resemble Category C prisons and are able to organise lots of fun activities.

That is why we need reverse grammar schools and why, naturally, the government is making it harder to exclude and punish those who make life a misery for other children and teachers. This is because they believe in the needs-based society; once you realise that this perverse principle governs every aspect of British life, you start to understand why the country is so mismanaged.

The Lost Men

The big article everyone is talking about, Jacob Savage’s ‘The Lost Generation’.

In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life. Suddenly, in Andrew’s newsroom, everything was driven by identity. There were endless diversity trainings, a racial “climate” assessment—at one point, reporters were told they had to catalog, in minute detail, the identity characteristics of all their sources. Andrew had been instrumental in forming the union at his company, and objected when negotiations shifted from severance pay and parental leave to demands for racial quotas. “They wanted to do like ... emergency hires of black people,” he said.

At The Atlantic, Andrew didn’t even get an interview. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief, had described his hiring philosophy back in 2019: “By opening up the possibilities of younger people, women, and people of color, by imagining their rise in a deliberate way, I’ve just widened the pool of potential leadership. There’s no quota system here.”

Goldberg was candid about another, less comfortable reality. “It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story,” he said in that same interview. “There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males.”

Since the publication of Savage’s piece, a number of people have recalled similar experiences, of being told that they’re perfect for the role but what they really need now is a POC or, even better, a WOC.

Many people still seem to misunderstand what is meant by ‘woke’, believing that it’s about extended compassion, but at its heart is a belief in equality of outcomes between groups, an idea downstream of the blank slate. If white men are over-represented in certain roles, it can’t be for any other reason than unfairness. It can’t be that more white men are competent at these jobs, or more interested.

Affirmative action, meanwhile, is still being pursued in Britain, where it will continue to erode our institutions, filling them with duds and fanatics.

The return of the Anglo

In a recent newsletter I pondered the rise in English-American identity, and Will Solfiac has looked into the subject.

It’s certainly possible that increased ancestry DNA testing or social trends explain some of the increased English ancestry identification in 2020, but clearly the main factor is this changed prompt. However, it is notable that English ancestry seems to be affected more by it being listed as an example than other ancestries are. In 2020, English, German and Irish were all added as example ancestries, having been absent since 1990, but German and Irish saw a much smaller uptick than English did. This would fit with the idea that English ancestry is more latent than others, and people are less likely to identify it unless they are prompted.

Years ago, I thought of writing a book about English influence on the United States, but it seemed too obvious; I will definitely write an article or two about the subject in the big anniversary year.

Progress news

The case for more big beautiful infrastructure projects

The Elizabeth Line is the most recent example: on its own it added 1.5 million, or 30 percent, to London’s labour market catchment – the people who can reach one of London’s three central business districts within 45 minutes by public transport. It has proved to be immensely popular: six of the ten busiest stations in the UK appear in a row in the Elizabeth Line’s core.

Stefan Schubert, one of Twitter’s top tweeters, has launched a substack, The Update.

He cites Ben Ansell’s substack post, on the effect of education on Left and Right wing voters.

What I want to remind you of is the interesting pattern you see within parties in each bloc. In the left bloc the education divide within each parties is almost completely vertical. So Labour voters who have below GCSE qualifications are more socially conservative than those with A-Levels, who are more socially conservative than those with degrees, especially post-grad ones. The same is true for Green voters. The same is true for Lib Dem voters. And it also looks true for Don’t Knows, which has me believe these are lost ‘left bloc’ voters on the whole.

By contrast among voters in the right bloc, the educational divide is horizontal. Right-leaning voters with higher education are more economically conservative than those with low education, even though their social attitudes are pretty similar. And the bloc as a whole is a long left to right lean with only a mild downward tilt.

In brief

Very strong new evidence against the notion that poverty causes crime.

Open Justice has published excerpts from the grooming gangs.

Ancient statues weren’t actually garishly coloured.

Oliver Sacks may have made stuff up. It’s a shame to hear that, as he was a beautiful writer and came across as a very humane man. I read A Leg To Stand On during quite a bad point in life and it made me feel a lot better.

On the subject of neurosis, 91.4% of worries experienced by people with anxiety never come true – those sound like pretty bad odds! Curiously, Calvin Coolidge replicates.

A new website allows you to render what those artistic impressions of new buildings will actually look like.

According to this database, there were at least 5,400 deaths from riots in France between 1661 and 1789, around 42 per year. They just love to riot, and that’s part of the charm.

Giving gifts at Christmas is an inefficient act and people would prefer money.

I didn’t realise that the exorbitant cost of refurbishing Parliament was due to their insistence on having disabled ramps in every corner of the Gothic masterpiece. They also want to include a ‘visitor centre’ and make it net zero compliant. It’s a mystery that Britain can’t build things.

Yes, it’s obviously terrible that our Parliament is falling apart, and we can’t afford to rebuild it, but at least it fits with the logo of this substack. Thanks so much for reading it in 2025, and have a fab 2026!