I’m back from my travels, having returned from Sri Lanka on Wednesday evening. It’s a beautiful country, inhabited by the kindest people you will ever meet, and even the ordeal of 12 and a half hours flying each way was a small price to pay. This heavenly setting rather jarred with my experience of reading about the island’s recent history, full of horror and tragedy, and in recent years the country has struggled. I will write about my impressions soon, although it did take me nine months to get the Vietnam piece done, so I’m not making any promises.
Sri Lanka was the birthplace of suicide bombing, a subject I wrote about last month, with a post on the background to the July 7 attacks in London (this wasn’t supposed to be a series, but I just can’t help myself, and there is more to come).
I also looked at the bizarre and secretive Afghan settlement scheme; since then, it’s been reported that former Taliban fighters are living in Britain after being airlifted by the Ministry of Defence.
There seems to be a notable difference in opinion between officers and men when it comes to the Afghans. The former seemed to develop a benevolently paternalistic view of them, while my impression is that the squaddies had a rather less favourable opinion of our brave allies.
I wrote about Christopher Hibbert’s book on the Medici; I also read his biography of Dr Johnson while in Sri Lanka, which was fun. (On that subject, I keep on meaning to write a post on my favourite history books).
I also celebrated two great works by historian Peter Brown, who just turned 90. The Black Death series also continued – here, here and here.
After returning to Rainy Fascist Brexit Island, I wrote about the Online Safety Act and attempts to shield the public from harm and hate.
As I mentioned in the piece, it’s especially bizarre that this is happening while at the same time the Government is allowing 16-year-olds to vote, something I criticised a while back.
As Daniel Hannan put it, ‘Labour backed raising the age of consent from 16 to 18 for getting a tattoo, buying alcohol, watching porn, opening a bank account, purchasing cigarettes, using a sunbed or being tried as an adult. Now they tell us they are acting from principle.’
Safeguarding rules still treat 16 and 17 year olds as children, and there are also questions about the further politicisation of schools.
On the other hand, one Labour politician put it, ‘Absolutely right that 16 and 17 year olds should be allowed to vote in elections. They are part of our present as well as our future.’ Good point, well made.
More in Common’s Luke Tryl points out that automatic voter registration is more significant as it will create more inner-city constituencies. I wonder which party will benefit most from this? (Actually, maybe not Labour, if the new Corbyn/Sultana party proves a going concern.)
The Online Safety Act also presumes that we can trust the authorities with our details. As Chris Snowdon quipped: ‘The government: “Give us your photo ID and credit card details if you want to access adult websites. They will kept confidential.” Also the government: “We accidentally sent the names of 20,000 enemies of the Taliban to the Taliban.”’
The British public, however, seem to be in favour, while also being unaware of the rules, and believing that they can’t work.
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Elsewhere, a teacher in Preston was sacked for criticising the sentencing of Lucy Connolly.
It’s worth repeating but, when people say that cancel culture doesn’t exist because journalists write about issues like this, not everyone has such freedom. As Chris Bayliss recently pointed out, there is a free speech gap between the self-employed and those subject to HR departments.
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The Bank of England may drop historical figures from banknotes as it seeks suggestions from the public: ‘Victoria Cleland, the Bank of England’s chief cashier, said that gender, ethnicity and disability could be taken into account when planning the designs.’ Of course.
It’s generally a bad sign when a state can’t find common figures to display on its bank notes, because they do not share common ancestral heroes; Sri Lanka’s notes, for instance, feature wildlife and generic figures in traditional dress, presumably because its most famous individuals are too divisive. I fear that Britain’s new notes will end up looking like this.
Charlotte Gill has a great scoop on how children are being made to send Valentine’s Cards to illegal migrants.
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Britain’s future status as the North Korea of woke continues. On that subject, Nick Timothy complains that: ‘A young constituent wanted to apply for the MI6 internship programme. He discovered he was ineligible because he's a white man. The Government says this is fine - as the intelligence agencies must become “more diverse”. The Equality Act is - yet again - the problem.’
This is incredibly stupid; not just because it’s obviously unjust, but because increasing the number of people of foreign descent in our security agencies hugely increases our vulnerability to hostile powers. God forbid that people might have conflicting and complex loyalties – as Parliament shows, that would be unthinkable.
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At the same time – and not unrelated – the authorities also act in an increasingly secretive and hostile way towards the population, as Madeline Grant wrote about last week:
‘Last year, the Home Office abruptly opened up a migrant hotel not far from a school in Warwick, giving nearby residents less than 24 hours’ notice. The site was immediately fenced off with zero communication from Warwick District Council to local residents. Overnight, concerned local parents became vigilantes and began patrolling the streets themselves. Some families won’t allow their teenage daughters to go outside in the evening; unsurprisingly, given the age profiles of some of the children recently allegedly targeted for attack and kidnap.
‘Though initially described as ‘temporary’, almost a year later, the hotel is still there, housing around 360 single, male migrants. NHS staff visit on-site. The local MP Matt Western put out a feeble statement shortly after the hotel opened, which did little to defuse locals’ anger: ‘Whether you agree with the method they arrived in the UK or not, they applied for asylum and are legally allowed to remain in the UK’ said Mr Western. ‘They are not “illegal immigrants” and we must endeavour to share the facts, not buzz-words which stir up anger and fear.’ It’s this insistence on trying to bat off reality with ‘ackshully’ comments like this which means nobody is listening to people like Matt any more.
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Arnold Kling had a good post on Type M arguments
An important combative tactic is to attribute evil motives to the other side. Years ago, I noticed that Paul Krugman and Rush Limbaugh were mirror images of one another in this regard. If you look at Krugman’s columns in the New York Times, it is remarkable the high percentage that had no substantive point to make; instead, they purported to expose the bad intentions of conservatives. I called these “type M” arguments. They were not consequentialist; instead, they were claims about the other side’s motives. Years later, I learned the term asymmetric insight.
Type M arguments are much easier for left-leaning commentators to use, because there is already the widespread presumption that their opponents are immoral, prejudiced or greedy. But this advantage is also something of a curse, and many progressive comment pieces make very little effort to argue why something might be good in itself, rather than focussing on the motivation of opponents. How many Guardian articles about healthcare have argued that the Tories want to sell off Our NHS to American friends and make a bundle? How many have compared health outcomes between Britain and Germany (the model that free-market liberals here would most like to imitate). It’s a major reason why a lot left-wing commentary feels so flat, even if there are honourable exceptions.
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‘The training is nothing. The will is everything. The will to act.’
James Kanagasooriam on agency, and the problem that too many people feel they lack control of their destiny.
The Nietzschean Trap is something made possible by the decoupling of “privilege measures” of land, inheritance, health, wealth, income, cultural power, education, personal resilience and job security. Everyone can now find a dimension in which they are the underdog, and their personal life story is overcoming great obstacles to achieve against the odds. If everyone is left behind then nobody is. The Nietzschean trap has ensnared people from across the spectrum.
He cites the following examples:
Some of the highest income parts of the home counties which with high concentration of leave voters were able to claim the mantle of “left behind” at the 2016 EU Referendum (but curiously not Remain Merseyside or north Haringey)
Activists that occupy organisations like Extinction Rebellion - with millionaire backgrounds re-imaging themselves as generational underdogs
How literal princesses talk about the difficulties of being company founders
People explaining their lives in reference to their parents’ lives and not their own
Where people vastly underestimate where they sit on the income spectrum
A world where millionaire pensioners get free bus-passes
Some might argue DEI schemes that allow some individuals with massive amounts of cultural power and income to gain access to jobs
As Tom Holland once put it, modern politics is largely about who gets to go on the Cross.
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Gurwinder on social media as a prison. I’m pretty open-minded about how much damage social media is doing to our brains, while suspecting that it’s probably not great. Personally, I can’t turn off even on holiday - the past couple of weeks I found myself in a tropical paradise and yet I unable to resist going on Twitter to see what the WOKE CRAZIES are up to.
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A poignant and moving speech by Danny Kruger, all the more so for being in an empty House of Commons.
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His colleague Neil O’Brien on Britain’s great sort.
And that urban-to-rural exodus seems to be accelerating. If we lump together the local authority areas classified by ONS as “rural” and those classified as “urban” we see an rising trend. There was a bump around Covid. But that bump was not unwound - in fact the rising trend runs right through it. By 2023 the annual “escape to the country” from our urban areas was more than twice as large as it was in 2012, and the population hadn’t doubled in that time (the population of England and Wales had increased 7.5%).
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Matthias Gisslar, an unknown academic, theorizes that wokeness strikes every 30 years— first in 1954-19684 with the civil rights movement, next in 1980-19955 with political correctness, and then in 2012-20246 with wokeness. Eric Kaufmann dismisses this as a just-so story, but I think it’s consistent with a model where wokeness is motivated by the youth and enabled by the elderly: the movement has a goal, tries to achieve it, and then the youth realize the fundamental problem is not getting solved, get demotivated, and move on. The next generation of youth are not aware of what happened in the last generation, or think this time might be different, and agitate for more change.
So the 2040s will be terrible then.
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The American candy store phenomenon explained. What a remarkable story.
Aziz, known as “Mr West End” for his dominance of the capital’s property scene, is keen to rub shoulders with the mayor of London and portrays himself as one of the capital’s leading philanthropists. According to The Times and the Daily Mail, the billionaire moved his tax residency to Abu Dhabi at the end of last year amid concerns the Labour government could increase the tax burden on wealthy individuals.
There is no legal responsibility for a landlord to enforce the payment of taxes by their tenants, nor any suggestion that Aziz should be paying the bill. Lawyers for Aziz said that while he is a founder of Criterion Capital, he is “not involved in the matter of day to day lettings” and this is a matter for “the commercial letting team at Criterion Capital.”
As one Twitter accounts puts it, he is The YooKay made flesh.
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Martin Robbins on why every generation feels they’re hard done by. Basically, millennials are better off than their parents - in almost every area but the one that matters, housing.
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Colin Gorrie on why English doesn’t use accents.
It may surprise you to read that English is written without diacritics due to French influence. After all, French is written with plenty of diacritics: écouter ‘listen’, à ‘to’, château ‘castle’, Noël ‘Christmas’, Français ‘French’.
But the French that the Normans brought to England was not French as it’s spoken and written today: it was a different, older form of the language — and one written very differently from the French you would find in a livre today.
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Aris Roussinos writes about Ulsterisation.
But if English rioters have drawn a lesson from Ballymena, it is that, judiciously applied, violence works: far more quickly and decisively than voting anyway. Five years ago, the British state bent its knee to a wave of protests and rioting over explicitly racialised solidarity with a different ethnic group thousands of miles away. Why would it not buckle further before the previously dormant, and now increasingly volatile, majority ethnic population? Even in Northern Ireland, as the Guardian recently observed, the Ballymena riots were successful on their own terms: “of the approximate pre-riot [Roma] population of 1,200, two-thirds are gone — or, to use a loaded term, ethnically cleansed.” For the residents of Epping, similar methods have proved equally effective. This is not a lesson a serious state should be imparting to its populace, but it is the situation the British state has now created for itself.
I do wonder if Northern Ireland is a precedent, not necessarily in open conflict, but in the state ceding power to ‘community representatives’, a trend already seen in England too; it’s long been clear that, if you want to get your way, threaten violence. It works, it’s seen to work, and this drains the state of authority. It certainly looks like we’re seeing a lot more flags going up. I hope that the murals will be pretty.
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Is the child penalty actually a daughter penalty? Some scepticism from Scientific Bird.
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The driving test as an example of the Nick, 30 phenomenon.
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More banned books LARPing – why do these pretend banned books list always feature The Handmaid’s Tale and To Kill a Mockingbird, which most people are literally forced to read at school, rather than, say, The Camp of the Saints?
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Most US Airlines are profitable, but actually lose money on flying people.
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More sperm bank shenanigans. I wrote about the subject earlier in the year.
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Cardiovascular disease mortality rates have declined by around three-quarters since 1950.
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‘Someone found a scarf that was made for Norwich Pride 2009, and washed it, and is taking it to Norwich Pride 2025.’ Important stuff from the BBC. This is what it must have felt like to be an early medieval pagan and being told that someone had found part of St Tibulus’s shinbone or something.
Anyway, it’s warm outside - switch off your phones, and enjoy the summer.
"The Bank of England may drop historical figures from banknotes as it seeks suggestions from the public."
In innocent pre-2020 days, when I was still on social media, I was part of a discussion about who we would put on British banknotes. I nominated Brunel for the £50 note (indisputably a Great Briton, and since engineering and communications relate directly to the generation of wealth, I thought it made sense to put him on the highest denomination). I put Jenner on the £20 note; he's probably saved more lives than any other Briton, so I thought it made sense to have him on the highest denomination commonly seen. And I wanted George Eliot on the £10 note, as self-evidently a greater novelist than Jane Austen.
I suggested Gladstone and Disraeli for the £5 note - putting them there jointly to avoid being partisan, and on the smallest denomination to remind us that politics is not the most important thing in life. I also thought that since they were active 150 years ago, they were too far in the past to be controversial. I realise now that this was a rather naive thought.
I also imagined that George Eliot, a woman, and Disraeli, a Jew, would satisfy demands for "diversity". I suppose this was rather naive too.
The shin bone line at the end!! Made me laugh out loud!! Thanks!!