Why the Danes do it better (and other stories)

Wrong Side of History newsletter #64

Good morning, people. The next Canon Club event will take place later this month, with Dr Alexander Lee discussing the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. There are still a few tickets available, so come along - this time I will insist that everyone stays for drinks afterwards.

Since the last newsletter, I wrote about the continuing attempts to justify the jailing of Lucy Connolly.

I continued my series on the cultural revolution of our age, with parts five, six and seven.

I wrote about land acknowledgements, and who is meant to gain prestige from these rituals.

Finally, I wrote about Richard Dawkins and the British Genius (a review of the Peter Watson book will follow soon). I should have expanded on Dawkins’s power as a writer more; when I have time I will reread the Blind Watchmaker and Selfish Gene.

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Elsewhere: Why are some moral panics remembered? Another strong post by Conor Fitzgerald.

Who would you identify as the villain if you made the Satanic Panic into a general moral lesson? Excessively empathetic social workers, psychologists employing what they believe to be the latest scientific methods, people presenting themselves as abuse victims, and any number of other people whose worldview seems to revolve around kindness, sympathy and vulnerability. For a society that privileges Progressive ideals, and especially for the kinds of people who write movies and help identify particular ones as worthy, these are the wrong kinds of villian.

Certainly in 2025, a story that warned society about the danger of people who project their neuroses and dark fantasies onto children; who coach children to lie about important things and encourage them to misrepresent their feelings in order to please adults; and who take what a child says as true even if it’s unbelievable and grotesque on it’s face - I think this would have some troubling political implications.

They would be even more troubling if the story warned that sometimes this can be erroneously encouraged by activists, teachers, members of the psychiatric and medical professions. In this case the message is a problem not because it has no political utility but because it has too much of the wrong kind.

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The Free Press on the absurdity of Britain’s justice system. Dominic Green writes:

Call for “Death to Israel” in the street, and the police turn a blind eye. Criticize the British government on social media, however, and the police may come to your house and issue an Orwellian warning that you’ve committed a Non-Crime Hate Incident.

The prisons in this country are so full that in July 2024, the Labour government released thousands of prisoners early. On May 13, the Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, announced further plans for the early release of serious offenders. This, she said, will free up more space for incoming offenders. Yet the British state has room for Lucy Connolly.

The more that this becomes an international embarrassment, the better. Green also notes that ‘For comparison, Judge Inman sentenced Haris Ghaffar to 20 months for his part in the disturbances. In the climate of rumor that had stirred Connolly, 19-year-old Ghaffar joined a mob of Muslim men, donned a balaclava, and tried to kick in the door of the Clumsy Swan pub in Yardley, Birmingham, because he believed that members of the far-right English Defence League were drinking inside.’

It also turns out that the same judge gave a lighter sentence to another man for involvement far more serious than Connolly’s. The reason the two-tier label sticks is because it’s obvious true - like all empires, the new British Empire considers majority nationalism the greatest threat to its existence.

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On a similar subject, Chris Bayliss in The Critic on Soviet Britain, with its ‘atmosphere of a paranoid and vindictive nomenklatura at the fag-end of its days’.

Two days after Connolly’s appeal was denied, the front pages of most British newspapers were full of positive coverage of the campaign to blunt the tips of kitchen knives to prevent them being used to stab people, as Axel Rudakubana had done. This was supposedly prompted by a survivor of the attack, who had come out in spontaneous support of the campaign on the grounds that kitchen knives “triggered” her due to the trauma she endured, and the potential for an unblunted knife to be used in a similar way again.

The “Let’s be Blunt” campaign emerged suddenly in January during a period where much of the news agenda was being dominated by growing public anger around the rape gangs scandal. It was aided almost immediately by a public intervention from the actor Idris Elba, along with the full support of the Home Secretary in a parliamentary statement shortly thereafter. The campaign enjoyed fulsome coverage across the political spectrum of Britain’s print media, and was covered extensively and uncritically by the BBC. Having then gone a little quiet, it reemerged in the aftermath of the Connolly appeal decision, again with universal positive coverage in print and in broadcast media.

While reading a bit of Armenian history in the autumn, I was intrigued to note that in the 1980s, as the region was overcome with ethnic violence, Soviet media would purposefully not report the ethnic background of perpetrators involved in inter-communal disturbances. Their thinking was that informing the public might only stir up division, when everyone should focus on the Soviet values that united them: hate must not win, foreign agitators should not be allowed to divide them. The result was even greater mistrust of media, and whenever one of ours got attacked, people would assume it was one of theirs, even when it wasn’t the case.

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Neil O’Brien has done an excellent post that makes my output look wildly optimistic in comparison.

Social breakdown interacts with welfarism, with arrows running in both directions: lone parent households are more likely to require welfare, and the welfare state incentivises social breakdown - the benefits system creates a strong couple penalty for those in work, creating a strong incentive to live apart.

The scale of the welfare problem is breathtaking. There are nearly half a million people living in households where no one has ever worked – this has doubled since winter 2020. There are almost one million young people not in education, employment or training. Around one in ten working age adults are not in work because they are unemployed or long term sick. 4.1 million people in England and Wales are on an incapacity or disability benefit - that’s one in seven adults in the North East and Wales.

It will require a true statesman to turn things around, seeing as the necessary changes will probably be unpopular and cause a shock to the system. But who is out there ready to grasp the sword from the stone and rescue the country from its malaise?

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Elsewhere, Robert Jenrick’s Tube fare-dodgers video has received over 14 million views. It’s a very clever piece of marketing, especially suited to TikTok, and probably a sign of the future direction of politics. This issue is also well-pitched; in my experience, even urban liberals really dislike the petty crime and squalor that is ubiquitous in London, and so the instinctive knee-jerk responses (it’s not a big issue! Why do you even care? What about the billionaires etc etc) don’t really land. Upper normies dislike crime, but lack the permission structure to notice or articulate their complaints, let alone vote for someone who will do something about it. Despite the mayor’s bad-tempered and prickly response, the video clearly caused the authorities in London to do something about the problem.

I remember as a child riding the new Docklands Light Railway and thinking how exciting and futuristic the whole thing was. Sitting at the front of a driverless train as it took you through the Docklands, which seemed both dystopian and full of promise. At Londonist, Matt Brown writes about London’s second metro system.

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James Marriott on reading and how to do it.

Very often the best non-fiction book on the topic is not the most recent one. Most general readers don’t need the up-to-date revisionist account of a topic (which is often the one Google recommends). Go for the best-written book every time.

I have a vague unprovable theory that there is a sweet spot of popular non-fiction books published between about 1960 and 2005 (roughly between Richard Ellman’s biography of Joyce and Leo Damrosch’s book about Rousseau, which is one of my favourite popular biographies). It’s not an inevitable rule, but many non-fiction books before 1960 now seem amateurish, waffly and dated. Many books published after the early 2000s are by authors who grew up in a less literature-saturated environment or were over-exposed to academic jargon, or were constantly checking their phones while they wrote.

I am a terrible one for persevering with a book even when it’s not working; I dislike not completing things, so I just put them to the side, promise to return, and my bedside table fills up with half-read books.

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A remarkable story by Sky’s Ed Conway on what happened to Leicester’s garment industry. It’s a classic tale that has been repeated throughout post-war industry: low-wage industry recruits cheap workers from the developing world >>> industry collapses but foreign workers stay >>> city is left with a foreign-born underclass with persistently high rates of unemployment.

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Should we allow the selling of kidneys?

Over 90,000 Americans are waiting for kidney transplants, with thousands dying each year. For those who get dialysis, the treatment is painful and exhausting. Thirty-seven percent of patients were forced to quit their jobs. The five-year death rate is similar to brain cancer.

Now, over 40 years since the National Organ Transplantation Act of 1984 made compensating kidney donors illegal in the United States, there might be hope. The End Kidney Deaths Act, a new piece of legislation to offer a $50,000 refundable tax credit to all non-directed kidney donors, spread out over five years. It has gained bipartisan support and a steadily growing number of cosponsors, including most recently Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi. This will hopefully be the year when compensating kidney donors becomes possible again.

Donating a kidney is a big ask, and while there are plenty of saints out there who do so, it is nowhere enough to meet demand. This seems like a sensible proposal, with checks built in.

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The last living grandson of President John Tyler, who occupied the White House in the 1840s, has died. I wrote about Tyler in my post on history connections, which was followed by part two and part three. I plan to post some historical listicles later in the year, as I have a few up my sleeve, and I have in mind some sort of Christmas book, but I’m not sure who except me would find stuff like ‘the world’s shortest wars’ and ‘people offered the throne of Albania’ interesting.

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Another example of how the Danes do it better. My Instagram feed is mainly a succession of continental homes which I fantasise about buying one day. Obviously France is the dream, but Danish properties seems to pop up a lot, and they’re curiously very cheap. In the Spectator James Lewisohn explains why:

By this point, you might be thinking that Danish summerhouses sound idyllic and imagining buying one as an alternative to suffering financial exhaustion as one of the UK’s second homeowners. Tough luck, I’m afraid: not only is the market undersupplied – Danish summer homes typically stay within families far longer than primary residences – but also, upon entering the EU Denmark negotiated an opt-out preventing foreigners from buying second homes in Denmark. This restriction also encourages a healthy summerhouse rental market, which helps Danes pay their second home bills.

Denmark consistently ranks among the world’s happiest countries, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to posit the causal link that Danes’ access to summerhouses is a good reason for them to be happy. Nothing, of course, prevents the UK from re-zoning its mostly empty coastal areas for part-time use as second homes; nothing except rampant nimbysim and the politics of envy. If any UK politician is brave enough to challenge the consensus of the postwar period, I look forward to cheering them on – remotely, from the comfort of my family’s Danish summerhouse.

Second homes are politically unpopular but Britain has a shockingly low number - about a quarter as many as the French. I dream of a Britain of abundant mansion flats within 15 minute’s walk of major London railway stations, from where the middle class can escape on a Friday afternoon to their country retreats, self-driven cars picking them up at the other end. When I, a Tory-leaning commentator, says that, everyone thinks I’m an out-of-touch elitist, whereas if we marketed it as a Danish thing, gave it a funny name like shølåppy to denote ‘the comfort one feels being in a cosy second home’, everyone would say it was a noble ideal that Britons should emulate.

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On the BBC Simon Reeves visited Denmark, where Social Democrat MP explained how his country is able to maintain high trust in politics: don’t lie about what’s going on.

Denmark isn’t ideal, and evidence in both Denmark and Sweden shows that the crime rates of immigrant descendants continue into the second and third generation; but while they still have their problems, they’ve made far less of a mess of it than Britain, France or Germany.

However, the BBC’s report on Denmark’s immigration policy noted that, while asylum applications are down, the country’s reputation for respecting international law has suffered. Do people actually, genuinely believe this, or is this lawyers promoting an obviously self-interested idea? The New York Times writing some negative articles about a country has very little impact on its reputation; no one cares. What does do damage is when visitors see cities which are squalid, menacing or dangerous, and where nothing works.

The Danish Parliament

Having seen Steven Pinker speak with Richard Dawkins earlier this week, I saw him talk for a second time, at Eric Kaufmann’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science conference. Check out the Buckingham University-based centre here.

The Trump administration’s war with Harvard came up quite a bit at the conference, and although often highly critical of his university, Pinker also recently defended the institution for the New York Times.

‘Most of my colleagues, too, follow the data and report what their findings indicate or show, however politically incorrect. A few examples: Race has some biological reality. Marriage reduces crime. So does hot-spot policing. Racism has been in decline. Phonics is essential to reading instruction. Trigger warnings can do more harm than good. Africans were active in the slave trade. Educational attainment is partly in the genes. Cracking down on drugs has benefits, and legalizing them has harms. Markets can make people fairer and more generous. For all the headlines, day-to-day life at Harvard consists of publishing ideas without fear or favor.’

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Eric Kaufmann also ponders whether woke is dying. My impression is that the gender/sexuality side has cooled down a bit, but the drive for equity continues. Just recently the Bar Standards Board dropped ‘plans to impose a new positive duty on barristers to advance equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), following strong criticism from across the profession.’ Meanwhile, DEI seems to continually get worse. And if woke is dying, companies like Air Canada haven’t got the message. Meanwhile, the government's anti-terrorism Prevent programme has designated ‘cultural nationalism’ an extreme right-wing terror ideology.

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American confidence in its institutions split by personal partisanship. The declining Republican trust in media pretty much matches onto the political imbalance of journalists. The Left: Right ratio of the media was about 2:1 in the 1970s but reached 5:1 in the 2000s, although declining trust was especially accelerated by the 2008 presidential election, when many Americans suspected – for some mysterious reason – that the media were pro-Obama. You could probably track a similar thing with scientists and progressive buzzwords to illustrate how politicised the subject had become.

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Is there a 'Quiet Revival' in churchgoing? The Church Mouse is a doubting Thomas.

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Wonky but interesting: Dan Neidle offers some ideas for tax reform

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A man was convicted of burning the Koran this week, and David Shipley writes that we have an Islamic blasphemy law in England. Tellingly, Paragraph 19 of the Hamit Coskun judgment states that the fact that a passing delivery driver hit him suggested that his actions were likely to cause alarm or distress. The man has since received death threats and may end up in hiding.

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Tim Stanley on New Zealand’s great liberal hope Jacinda Arden.

Large sections are dedicated to an uneventful youth in Murupara, a one-horse town on the north island – the Maori name translates as “to wipe off mud” – where Ardern was born in 1980. Her father was a cop, her mother a school catering assistant. The Arderns were Mormons, a fact that threatens to make the author remotely interesting – until we learn that she lost her faith after watching a romcom, about a gay Mormon missionary who gives up God for love. Lucky Ardern didn’t watch Top Cat, or she might have embarked upon a life of crime.

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Nathan Pinkoski on Alasdair MacIntyre, who died last month.

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Progressives love the fantasy of a regime of censorship still being controlled by the Right, a position of rebellion which they find comforting but hasn’t been the case for decades. Occasionally you'll read some breathless report about conservative states banning books, and you’ll look at the details and it’s inevitably some explicitly graphic sex book aimed at primary school kids called Your First Book of Bumming or similar.

So it was amusing to see this banned book ‘speakeasy’, featuring the most freely available books imaginable, even if some school boards might have restricted them in the distant past. As far as I can tell, the only books currently banned by Amazon are those suggesting gender or sexual identities might be mental illnesses, and I also don’t imagine that many public libraries stock The Camp of the Saints.

In brief

Huge gender split among young Koreans. The centre-right candidates got 74 per cent of the young male vote, while 58 per cent of young women voted for the centre-left candidate (who won). That feels incredibly unhealthy.

What percentage of Americans have passports? Far more than most people believe!

I watched the new Fred and Rose West documentary series on Netflix, and rather wish I hadn’t – an utterly horrific story. It brought to mind one of Theodore Dalrymple’s great essays on the subject.

New paper on which academics are leaving Twitter for Bluesky.

Britain is now being taught at a French university as a cautionary tale.

How would Nick (30 ans) vote - as expected. Once again, I’m left to do what conservatives do when they’re losing, by reaching for Marxist analysis, in this case false consciousness. The danger is that, rather than confront what makes his life intolerable expensive, Nick will just emigrate.

This week I learned about Ten Cent Beer Night, a scheme to promote cheaper beers at baseball games. It ended as expected. In English football, fans cannot drink alcohol within sight of the pitch; in Scotland they’re not allowed alcohol in the stadium at all. I wonder if this is one of those areas where the promotion of small beer (2-2.5% strength) might work; I believe that in Australia you can drink weak beer all day while watching cricket.

The renaming of the USNS Harvey Milk is an example of a ‘smarter right-wing that has learned how to set a narrative trap’. Seems true: I was aware that Milk was not entirely a saintly figure, but it’s a good point that people tend to judge one’s motives in raising a point, or claim you’re weird for ‘even caring about that’.

A new paper looks at ‘spatial patterns of homicide in three 14th-century English cities—London, York, and Oxford—through the Medieval Murder Map project, which visualizes 355 homicide cases derived from coroners’ inquests’, to look at where and why medieval people people were likely to murder each other.

It was interesting to learn that 14th century London and York had homicide rates of around 20–30 per 100,000 (comparable to a violent American city like Chicago) while Oxford had a rate of around 90–110 per 100,000! Presumably, this much higher rate is because the period includes the St Scholastica Day riots, in which 90 people were murdered in just one weekend in Oxford.

The Trump administration is planning to rebuild Penn station, apparently. That would be incredible.

Progress towards the total defeat of cancer

Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds have become parents for the fourth time. Boris now has nine or ten children, maybe more, and by 2200 experts predict that everyone in Britain will either be descended from the Boriswave, or from Boris himself.

Does testosterone make people have more masculine economic preferences and more Right-wing?

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Incidentally, I have a Facebook page, although I almost never check Facebook, which I suppose I should do now that Elon has strangled links on Twitter. On that subject, sad and totally unexpected to see that the world’s two most narcissistic men have fallen out, and so reassuring to see it all done in public. There’s much I admire about Elon, and I wish he’d stop getting involved in needless drama: summon the adventurous spirit of your British ancestors, damn it, and take humanity to the stars.