Feral Historian
Published 3 Jul 2026“The Scouring of the Shire”, omitted entirely from the film, ties together many of Tolkien’s key themes. While Gondor shows us a contrast between the mythic Kings of old and the mundane Stewards that followed them, Saruman’s fall and revenge on the Shire shows the same transformation of evil, from a dark wizard in a tower to little men hiding behind titles and rules.
00:00 Intro
03:50 Depersonalizing Authority
05:38 The King and the State
07:04 Mythic vs Mundane
10:28 Boromir
November 2, 2026
Return of the King: On the Scouring of the Shire
October 31, 2026
Halloween Special: War of the Worlds
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 30 Oct 2026Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! A scavenger bird feasting on the corpses of the enemies we once believed invincible! And all I did was sneeze into its open mouth a couple times!
QotD: Gerald Gardner, Margaret Murray and the rise of modern Wicca
The other major theorist to shape Gardnerian practice was Margaret Murray. Although Hutton reviews Murray’s influences, she stands above them all as the scholar who most thoroughly and influentially articulated the theory now associated with her: not only that substantial aspects of European paganism survived the introduction of Christianity and centuries of inadequate catechism, but that the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries were a major effort to suppress this surviving pagan religion. Her 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe lays out the model, and Murray includes distinctly Frazerian elements about ritual kings who were sacrificed or self-sacrificed (though now with the added element that these corn kings were allegedly syncretized with the Horned God, an aspect that reflects Pan, as a motif popular with literary figures associated with Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn).
Her terser but equally influential version of the theory was in the entry for “Witchcraft” that she wrote for the Encyclopedia Britannica, which published it from 1929 to 1968.1 For generations, if you heard about Salem and wanted to get more information about witches, you would go to the library and find the Encyclopedia Britannica, (or if you were fancy, the installment plan-financed set on your own bookshelf), reach for the “W” volume, and a few paragraphs in go, “Wow, real witches, amazing!” Murray’s theory has thus been extremely influential. Whenever a Wiccan refers to their religion as “the Old Religion” or a feminist refers to “the Burning Times”, they are alluding to Murray’s theory.
Murray had a big influence on Gardner (and wrote the foreword to his short book Witchcraft Today). Gardner claimed he did not invent Wicca but had been inducted into a coven with centuries of historical continuity, and while this claim was implausible it reflects Murray’s emphasis on an underground witch cult. Among the places Gardner describes this liturgy was his novel, High Magic’s Aid, which he would circulate to potential initiates to gauge their reaction to the rituals described therein.2 “The witch religion portrayed [there],” Hutton writes, “is that of Margaret Murray’s God of the Witches, in virtually every detail, including its dedication to a single male deity of fertility, whose name is given here (again taken from Murray) as Janicot”. The practitioner implementing the ideas of the theorist is classic performativity: there was no pagan witch religion in early modern Europe, but Murray’s claim that there had been was among the most important raw material from which Gardner created an actual pagan witch religion in mid-20th century Britain.
Through all this, there is the question of how so many 20th century scholars got it so wrong — especially given that in the 19th century, both scholars and popular culture understood that witch hunts were moral panics and mass hysteria.3 Black-Scholes-Merton may not have been a perfect description of options prices, but it got much closer to the truth than the idea of pagan survivalism, which is almost completely wrong. Hutton repeatedly notes the importance of relevant expertise, and how often the proponents of pagan survivalism lacked it. Many folklorists influenced by Frazer were simply amateurs, but Murray had legitimate scholarly expertise: she was a respected Egyptologist. This background left her equipped to see a pagan society saturated with magic, but led to a false positive when applying that gaze to Christian medieval and early modern Europe. Nonetheless, in the mid-20th century, Murray’s ideas became accepted in British academia and were integrated into K-12 history textbooks.
However, Hutton notes that such acceptance was mostly from people who did not actively research the witch trials. In contrast, witch trials were an active research area in the United States, and so American scholars remained skeptical even as the Murray thesis became taken for granted in the UK. And while it might be tempting to congratulate America for our pragmatic empiricism, Hutton notes that there was also a subtext of Americans favoring the “persecution of innocents” model for witches because it had become a popular metaphor for the Second Red Scare, as in Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible. American scholars of the 1950s and 1960s may have gotten the history of witch accusations in the 16th and 17th centuries right because they saw it as metaphor for the history of the 1930s through 1950s … which the Venona cables show they got wrong.
Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST REVIEW: The Triumph of the Moon, by Ronald Hutton”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-12-01.
- Fortunately cranks writing the encyclopedia is an issue safely in the past.
- “Check out my fantasy novel (that describes the counter-cultural religion with transgressive rites that I actually practice and wish to induct you into)” is a more elaborate version of using plausibly deniable indirect speech to broach a taboo proposition.
- Volume 2 of Charles Mackay’s 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds contains a lengthy section on the early modern witch hunts that captures the 21st century scholarly consensus that witch hunts were the result of a moral panic and opportunistic expression of grudges as abetted by poor legal process. Mackay’s history differs from the current scholarly consensus only in failing to understand that witch trials were most aggressive in weak states, especially those whose establishment of religion was sufficiently tenuous as to be threatened by popular sentiment that the prince exercised insufficient brutality in defending the populace against hostis humanis generis.
October 30, 2026
Neo-kremlinologists still find value in The E-Communist, er, I mean The Economist
In The Critic, Chris Bayliss explains how the once-great Economist can still have uses in its much decayed pro-managerialist guise:
Despite what people say, The Economist is still worth reading. This is true for two reasons — firstly whilst the depth of its analysis is not what it once was, it still covers the domestic affairs of a range of developing countries that would be too obscure for other news outlets. Secondly, it is because its editorial line can give fascinating hints about the tectonic movements of managerial elite opinion. Gauging a group of people whose view of the world is driven entirely by consensus is generally a very predictable game — until the moment it isn’t. And it is The Economist we can sometimes look to for the early signs of a change of course.
For us neo-kremlinologists, the magazine has been unduly generous in the last week, providing two interesting snapshots into the neuroses and instincts of the lumpenintelligentsia at the present moment. Before I go any further, it is important to add that these people are not uniformly specious or slow on the uptake — like the Soviet intelligentsia in the 1970s, it includes many highly intelligent and perceptive people, who may be thoughtful or even forthright about the crises that beset us, but only discreetly and on an individual basis. In the atmosphere of stultifying intellectual conformity that they inhabit, what matters is what they feel comfortable discussing and admitting to one another in public, because it is that which shapes the direction of policy. And it is on that that the Economist‘s cachet can be helpful, by virtue of the freedom it lends its unbylined writers to think aloud.
It was the more recent of the two articles that has garnered the most attention. An article titled “Do immigrants from some countries commit more sex crimes?” on 25th October admitted that, yes, they do. The piece was accompanied by a graphic showing — on a logarithmic scale — the rate at which immigrants in Britain were convicted of sexual crimes, by nationality, relative to that of British nationals. The graphic showed very clearly that nationals of countries in non-EU Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East were substantially more likely to be convicted of sexual crimes than British nationals, with people from Afghanistan way out ahead of any other group. EU nationals, meanwhile, were slightly less likely to be convicted of such offences, and East Asians and Australasians even more underrepresented in the statistics. People from the Americans and the Caribbean were, on average, roughly equal to British nationals in their prolificness.
On social media, it was the graphic which prompted the most voluble response; particularly the use of the log scale which, visually, seemed to minimise the scale of the sevenfold disparity between the Afghan rate of sex crime conviction, and the British average. This seemed to hark back to arguments that took place during the Covid pandemic in which the use of log scales for graphs showing the number of new infections or deaths flattened the lines on the graphs and, critics claimed, made the scale of the pandemic seem less severe than it was. But whereas the use of log scales for naturally exponential processes such as viral transmission is in line with standard scientific practice, it is usually considered less appropriate — or even misleading — when the point of narrative interest is the additive difference between two figures, rather than multiplicative growth. Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible that the decision to use a log scale was made in good faith, in the interests of conserving page space.
Arguments about the x-axis notwithstanding, it is still a big deal that The Economist would print this. The fact that certain groups of migrants — especially illegal arrivals and asylum seekers from highly unstable countries — are disproportionately likely to commit rape or sexual assault has been one of the most powerful anti-immigration arguments in recent years. It is a point that defenders of the status quo have often been highly sensitive about. In polite and liberal circles, the idea of even looking for a link between national and ethnic origins and sex crimes has hitherto been considered inherently racist and demagogic. In September 2025, an open letter titled “Women against the Far Right” — which was signed by a long list of prominent leftish politicians and celebrities — included the statement that “there is no evidence that people seeking refuge are more likely to commit acts of sexual violence”. This was an easily verifiable or falsifiable objective claim, which they clearly took no effort to verify or falsify, on the reasonable-enough grounds that such data ought to be extremely hard to come by in Britain.
Update, 31 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
October 29, 2026
Retelling (distorting) Indian history for propaganda purposes
On a recent visit to the Red Fort in Delhi [Wiki], one of the most historically significant structures surviving from Mughal times, Dr. Robert Lyman toured the museum and found that the decolonialist fanatics have taken over historical interpretation:
The entrance to the Red Fort Museum.
Photo by Amit Ranjan via Wikimedia Commons.
I popped into the museum at the Red Fort in Delhi today. I hadn’t been here since 2019, and I’d been told that the museum had been revamped. I was pleased, because the last time I’d been here it was tired. But what I encountered was both shocking and worrying. I am all for having a divergence of opinion on historical matters, and I am as conscious as anybody of the sensitivities that exist on the subject of 1857. Likewise, we all increasingly aware of the heavily-biased historical narratives forced on people in various parts of the world, and worry about them. I have been acutely aware of the “decolonisation” process in India in recent years. But I wasn’t expecting to find such flagrant nonsense being perpetrated in the holy-of-holies of Indian independence, the Red Fort, today.
But nonsense it was, displayed in bold, assertive strokes, designed to present a definitive account of the birth of modern India from the trauma of British colonialism.
The first was a warning that naughty British historians still pushed a line contrary to the truth known to all true Indians that the “war of independence” was a popular rebellion against rampant imperial oppression:
That this is chock full of contestable assertions should be obvious to all but a few unhinged Oxford academics (you know the ones I mean) and the Guardian.
There are three floors of this stuff. As one enters a fascinating definition of colonialism is presented:
I wonder what the Romans would have made of this silliness.
Likewise, I hesitate to describe the following as history, let alone an intelligent analysis of the economic impact of colonialism. When I first came across the subject at university in the 1980s it was presented as the Marxist view of history. It was vacuous and unintelligent at the time, and remains so today:
On the Christianity point, I’ve done my own count and have calculated that from a population of 200 million across the sub-continent at the time there were 120,000 Britons (including 40,000 troops) and of this number about 450 were ordained. It was going to take a long time to Christianise India on this basis …
October 28, 2026
Rommel’s Rampage – Battle for North Africa Spring 1941
Real Time History
Published 5 Jun 2026The Italian Army in North Africa is in disarray after the British Operation Compass. Hitler reluctantly sends help in the form of the newly formed Afrika Corps under Erwin Rommel. Despite his orders, he immediately goes on the offensive and pushes back the British who are also reeling from the Axis invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia. But Rommel’s bold leadership style has drawbacks and in May 1941, the vital port town of Tobruk still holds out.
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October 27, 2026
Odd Man Out | A Film Portrait of Enoch Powell (1995)
Eugenus Rex
Published 6 Jun 2021In an insightful and sobering documentary, journalist Michael Cockerell chronicles the life and career of the politician, classical scholar, linguist, soldier, poet and altogether self-identifying outcast; the Right Honourable Brigadier John Enoch Powell. Featuring interviews with Mr. Powell, his family, friends and the former Prime Minister, the Baroness Thatcher.
Originally broadcast: 11th November, 1995.
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October 26, 2026
US Armament Reproduction DeLisle Commando Carbine (Silenced .45ACP)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Jun 2026The DeLisle Commando Carbine is one of the coolest special operation weapons of the Second World War — an SMLE rebuilt in .45ACP with a ginormous suppressor. It fed from slightly modified 1911 magazines, and thanks to .45ACP being subsonic in its normal loading, it is incredibly quiet. Because the gun is relatively easy to make (being based on a readily available receiver), one-off and limited-run reproductions have been around for a while, but always hard to find.
US Armament has begun making a serial-production new DeLisle, and they send me one on loan to film. It is very, VERY quiet, and runs more smoothly and reliably than I expected, as the originals have a reputation for being finicky. The reproduction elements are quite good, although not quite perfect in the details (like the muzzle assembly, sights, and handguard). However, I believe the price is quite high for the product.
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October 24, 2026
Everyone has an opinion on Oliver Cromwell
On Substack, Charles Haywood reviews The Making of Oliver Cromwell by Ronald Hutton:
If you know anything about Oliver Cromwell — and few do nowadays — you probably have an opinion about the man. Some vilify him; “A curse upon you, Oliver Cromwell, you who raped our Motherland”, the Irish rock band The Pogues sang. Others praise him as an enemy of arbitrary rule and a proto-republican. Ronald Hutton’s new biography of Cromwell’s early life and his climb to prominence makes no final judgment on the man, but it does offer a nuanced view of this complex historical figure. From Hutton’s excellent book we get not just history but the realization, in this desiccated age, that men such as Cromwell always emerge during great turmoil, rising as if from sown dragon’s teeth.
Hutton wisely focuses on his subject, and makes no attempt to tease out the political and social complexities behind the Civil War. He expertly evokes the England of the mid-seventeenth century, both in politics and the natural world. As to the latter, quite often Hutton describes in detail the flora of the region and season, at the same time he narrates a particular historical event, which makes the reader feel more immersed in the story, as if he were there. It also makes the reader a little sad, though. Why? Because it brings to the mind’s eye a lost time and a lost country, before industrialization, liquid modernity, and alien invitees destroyed both the English landscape and England’s ancient culture.
The short version of Hutton’s biography is that Cromwell “was both godly and wily, and the two at times seem to jar with each other”. No doubt this is often true for a godly man called to be a temporal leader. Hutton believes that most Cromwell biographers focus too much on the godliness and too little on the wiliness. This is not really a popular history; it offers extensive notes, and Hutton often refers to controversies among Cromwell scholars of little interest to the casual reader. Nonetheless, it is very readable, so any reader who is willing to put in a little effort will be rewarded.
Until he was forty, Cromwell lived as an obscure provincial, a collateral descendant of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s minister who fell from grace. In his thirties, however, he became a devout Puritan, something about which we know very little. (He kept no archive of correspondence, and while he left voluminous public words, he left no record of his own private thoughts other than letters to others.) Hutton fleshes out what we can know about Cromwell’s life prior to 1640, in the East Midlands, in and near Huntingdon. There was no reason to expect great things from Cromwell; he was on the lower border of the gentry, a man of no importance. In fact, for a time until he inherited money from his uncle, he directly worked the land as a tenant farmer.
[…]
For the next two years, relations between Parliament and King deteriorated, and the countryside began to separate into armed factions. When Charles sought to fund himself by asking for donations from Cambridge colleges, Cromwell returned to Cambridge, apparently on his own initiative, and raised a militia, successfully preventing the dispatch of gold and silver to the King. Soon he was formally commissioned a cavalry officer in the army being raised by Parliament, and so he remained for the entire war, rising ever higher in rank.
From 1642 until 1646, the end of the period covered by Hutton’s book, Cromwell alternated vigorous military activity with political activity. He remained a member of Parliament. In 1645 Parliament, in order to resolve a dispute between the Lords and Commons, forbade members to also be military officers. Such a separation was part of creating the famous New Model Army—but Cromwell alone was given a dispensation. This was meant to be very temporary, meeting an immediate critical need, not an acclamation of Cromwell, who had made plenty of internal enemies. But as it happens, Cromwell’s greatest military successes immediately followed, at the most crucial period of this first phase of the Civil War, and so he continued to both lead soldiers and serve in Parliament. This lucky confluence of events was what ultimately made Cromwell.
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October 23, 2026
Quebec is to Canada as Scotland is to the United Kingdom
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Fortissax explores the idea that Quebec’s relationship to the rest of the Demented Dominion closely resembles the sometimes awkward relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK (but primarily England):
People have often compared the relationship between Anglo Canada and Quebec to that of England and Ireland, and while there are some similarities there particularly in the visceral emotions during the Cold War, I’d actually argue that Quebec is closer to Canada’s Scotland.
Scotland entered the British union in 1707 as an established kingdom with its own institutions and national consciousness. Québec entered Confederation in 1867 as the homeland of French Canadians, whose institutions and identity predated the Dominion.
Scotland and Quebec became elements of a larger political order while retaining separate identities. Both the English and Scottish can be British, both Anglo and French Canadians can be “Canadian”.
Scotland preserved its legal system and established church under the Union of 1707. Québec retained its civil law tradition, while the Quebec Act of 1774 protected Catholic religious practice and established important foundations for institutional continuity
Scottish identity has historically coexisted with British identity, just as French Canadian identity has coexisted with Canadian identity. In both cases, nationalists have disagreed over whether their distinctive peoplehood is best expressed through political independence or continued participation in a multinational union.
Scots were disproportionately involved in, and benefited enormously from, the British Empire, particularly through commerce, banking, industry, trade, colonial administration, and the military.
French Canadians likewise disproportionately participated in and benefited from the expansion of British North America and the Canadian economy, establishing banks, credit unions, grocery enterprises, factories, and steamship companies. They helped establish the Hudson’s Bay Company, the North West Company, explored vast swathes of the continent, contributed four Fathers of Confederation, and produced six prime ministers
Fast forward to 2026, certain Scottish and Québécois nationalists are suddenly smol wittle itty bitty decolonial Third World beans who dindu nuffin, possessed absolutely no historical agency, and were apparently dragged kicking and screaming into the imperial projects their ancestors helped build.
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October 22, 2026
QotD: The “numbers fallacy” in World War II
During the war the smaller campaigns tended to get less credit — though it is sometimes suspicious that numbers are valued in some circumstances, and area in others. The Mediterranean Front against the Axis was an extraordinarily long campaign over an extremely large area, yet many – particularly Americans who often fail to understand the Mediterranean’s importance to intercontinental strategy – discount its scale and significance. (A British general visiting the Soviets responded to toasts about the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow by offering a toast to El Alamein. The bemused Soviets asked how big the battle was, and then commented “we would call that a skirmish” – a point which emphasises the fact that the hundreds of Soviet divisions embraced by historians of the Eastern Front were rarely as big as a British brigade or American Regimental Combat Team. To get a real comparison western divisions should be compared to Soviet corps.)
Similarly the Burmese and New Guinea theatres are incredibly undervalued in their role against Japan. There were more Japanese divisions fighting longer and harder in either place than everywhere that American troops fought the Japanese put together. (The fact that in New Guinea it was Australians rather than Americans who did most of the successful fighting – the American troops first assigned disappointed their vainglorious Füaut;hrer MacArthur enormously at first – might have had an influence on this ranking.)
By contrast the Western Front against Germany in 1944 to 45 is overstated both in the area it covered, and in the number of troops involved (almost half the US troops listed for that campaign did not arrive until it was already almost over. A dozen divisions had barely landed in France before the Germans surrendered.) Which puts it in the same category as the Pacific campaign, which, if the allied troops are discounted – as they so often were by the Americans – rarely saw more than a couple of American divisions at a time engaged anywhere.
The confusion is added to by the enigma that remains China, which is simultaneously undervalued and overvalued. It is undervalued in that China and Manchuria occupied the attention of 80% of the Japanese army throughout the war. Which means that by the standards applied by some historians, China was the Soviet Union of the East, and deserves all the glory that was lavished on communist Russia by the trendy historians of the last generation. On the other hand it was overvalued, in that China achieved virtually nothing in the war against the Japanese apart from occupying large numbers of very low-grade garrison troops. In fact when the US Air Force in one of its fits of vainglory, attempted to bomb Japan into submission from bases in China: the Japanese garrison troops stirred themselves enough to sweep forward and conquer – without any trouble at all – the provinces being used as bases (Operation Ichi-Go).
Nigel Davies, “Oversimplification: The Numbers Fallacy in WWII”, rethinking history, 2009-03-08.
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October 20, 2026
Britain’s regulatory “vetocracy”
I learned a new word today, although it describes a phenomenon as old as bureaucracy. “Vetocracy” in Britain is a combination of ordinary government bureausclerosis with wider regulatory powers that can (and are) used to “veto” otherwise legal and beneficial activities:
A public company in the UK was building a high-speed railway when it suddenly faced a regulation that few could have predicted: a £100 million ($132 million) bat tunnel. The railway passed through Sheephouse Wood, an area inhabited by rare Bechstein’s bats. To comply with environmental regulations that protect the bats from colliding with high-speed trains, the company had to build a roughly one-kilometer covered structure alongside the railway. This structure has since become widely known in the UK as the “bat tunnel.”
If you think this is just one case, let me tell you about the fish disco. EDF Energy was developing a new nuclear power station in Somerset, which draws cooling water from the Severn Estuary. The project faced regulatory requirements to reduce the number of fish being drawn into and killed by its cooling-water intake pipes. EDF agreed to three measures: specially designed low-velocity intake heads, a fish recovery-and-return system, and an acoustic fish deterrent—underwater speakers that make noise to steer fish away, nicknamed the “fish disco.” The acoustic deterrent alone reportedly costs about $66 million, while EDF says the full fish-protection package costs more than $926 million.
The problem with the UK is that it has become a vetocracy. Francis Fukuyama, the famous author of The End of History, explored this problem in his often-overlooked book Political Order and Political Decay. The concept helps explain part of the productivity puzzle in the Western world. Vetocracy means “rule by veto”: a political system with so many points at which organized minorities, courts, agencies, legislators, or interest groups can block action that the majority struggles to govern.
At first glance, this might seem necessary to protect democracy from majority rule and dictatorship. The separation of powers, independent courts, and an independent judiciary are essential safeguards. As Montesquieu famously wrote, “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.” But vetocracy is not simply about separating powers and protecting minority rights from the majority; it is about paralyzing democratic institutions and preventing the government from functioning.
Giving any bureaucracy the power to say “no” almost always means that organization will say “no” far more often than it says “yes”, because there’s no risk to the bureaucrat or their bosses for blocking something, but there’s a tangible risk if they approve something that later proves dangerous or even just controversial. Bureaucracies generally prefer to operate largely out of sight — and therefore out of public scrutiny — and danger to the public or controversy in the media brings public attention to the organization or, worse, to the individual bureaucrat who said “yes”.
… the more serious costs are the ones unseen: the products that fail to come to fruition as a result of regulation. As the Austrian school economist Per Bylund has argued in his book The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized: How Regulations Affect Our Everyday Lives, the problem with regulation is that it limits the possibilities of what could happen. It is not just about the direct financial cost of compliance. It is about the choices that disappear, the investments that never happen, and the economic freedom that is gradually eroded. The real cost of regulation is not only what we can see, but also what we never get to see because it was never built in the first place.
Vetocracy is a product of an overextended state: one that wants to be the dominant actor in the economy and micromanage every aspect of economic life. Sooner or later, it discovers that governing is not as easy as it looks. The barriers originally created by the state in the name of better governance can make effective governance almost impossible. A vetocracy is a democracy that has accumulated so many opportunities to say no that it has lost the practical ability to say yes.
October 18, 2026
Singapore: The rise of Lee Kuan Yew
At The Wrong Side of History, Ed West continues his review of Lee Kuan Yew’s autobiography, detailing the difficult period after the British withdrawal from overseas military commitments “East of Suez”, including the vast naval base in Singapore and the Royal Air Force’s Changi air base:
October 31, 1971, and the British are saying goodbye to their military base in Singapore, the city where the empire endured its greatest humiliation. Three years earlier, an increasingly straitened former imperial power had announced its immediate closure as part of their withdraw east of Suez. For the recently independent city-state, this was a disaster, and prime minister Lee Kuan Yew had done his best to postpone the big day. The city already suffered from high unemployment, and Britain’s military accounted for 20 per cent of Singapore’s GDP, providing 30,000 direct jobs and 40,000 in support.
Yet retreat was inevitable, and when the day came British forces were given a ceremonial send-off, Lee writes in his memoir, the withdrawal carried out with “good intentions, goodwill and good faith”. After 150 years in the Strait, the British were gone, handing over the airbase to the colony they created for the symbolic fee of one dollar.
Lee had cut his teeth in the independence movement, but the city-state could not survive without protection. As with many small countries which had depended on the British, Singapore now shifted its allegiances to its successor state, the United States of America.
The imperial retreat presented a huge financial headache for the former anti-colonial activist, but increasingly a more personal sense of unease. “I feared that slowly but inexorably British influence would decline”, he writes: “and American influence expand. For my generation born and bred in empire, it was not an easy change. I had to come to terms with American power without a British buffer. The British had enforced their will with a certain civility. The Americans were different, as I could see from the way they dealt with South Vietnamese leaders, and even with Thai and Filipino leaders who were not in as parlous a position as those in Saigon. America was a power on the ascendant, with bulging muscles and a habit of flexing them.”
Lee had built up a good relationship with both Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, and used this to delay the withdrawal for as long as possible. He had less luck in getting the British to help Singapore train their army, something they had done with Malaysia where the threat of communist insurgency necessitated it. Neither were most of the other newly independent states willing to help: Egypt’s Nasser recognised Singapore and sent good wishes, but ignored his requests for military aid. India’s prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri also said no, so he turned to another small post-colonial nation surrounded by hostile neighbours. When a small group of Israelis arrived in November 1965, they had to keep their existence a secret to prevent unrest from the Malay minority. “To disguise their presence, we called them ‘Mexicans'”, he recalls: “They looked swarthy enough”.
The Chinese here traditionally shunned military service, “a historical legacy of the predatory habits of soldiers during the years of rebellions and warlords in China”. As trading people they looked down on the military as a career choices, and he quotes the Chinese saying “a good lad does not become a soldier, good steel does not become nails”.
Lee also had to negotiate the problem of “representation” which mars all multicultural societies. Under the British, the city had been policed by Malays, often recruited from Malaysia itself, as well as the more neutral Gurkhas. Now “we had to find some way to induct more Chinese and Indians into the police and armed forces to reflect their population mix”, otherwise they would not be accepted as legitimate. “We wanted the people to regard our soldiers as their protectors – a reversal from the days when army and police uniforms aroused fear and resentment as symbols of colonial coercion”.
Conscription, unpopular under the British, was reintroduced, and the authorities even set up military cadet corps in all secondary schools, although his colleague Goh Keng Swee reflected that “the Spartan approach to life does not come about naturally in a community that lives by buying and selling”. As with Israel, another small state formed by a market-dominant minority, they were forced to adapt their way of life to survive; yet rather than become the new Sparta, Singapore focussed on becoming the new Corinth, a commercial centre where great fortunes could be made. When the British finally withdrew, RAF Changi Air Base became Changi Airport, a transport hub which came to epitomise the city’s commercial success.
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October 17, 2026
British disability programs may extend to 25% of the population under current criteria
In the above-the-paywall portion of his latest post, eugyppius makes the case that the British social state, along with most other western countries, has metastasized to the point that it is uncontrollable:
Production line for the VW Beetle – symbol of a happier age, when our politicians forged a new democratic social state in Germany that today can no longer be financed or reformed.
Photo from eugyppius: a plague chronicle
On Sunday the Wall Street Journal published a long article headlined “The Welfare State is Crushing Britain“. It focusses on but one aspect of the UK social system, namely disability and sickness benefits, and its details are equal measures depressing, familiar, predictable and alarming.
Like other European redistributionist schemes, British disability payouts have steadily ballooned in the postwar period – expanding from a niche benefit for those unable to work due to serious illness and on-the-job injuries to a morass of programmes that showers millions of people with billions in pointless, self-defeating subsidies.
A 2024 government survey found that fully 25% of the entire British population might be considered disabled under present inflationary criteria, which adds perspective to the eye-watering figure of 10% presently drawing benefits. The fastest growth in disability claims occurs among working-age demographics, where compensation, once granted, soon becomes a powerful disincentive to work. In this way the British disability system actively cannibalises its own tax base. The total bill for sickness and disability benefits this year will exceed £100 billion, which comes on top of the £280 billion the British taxpayer presently spends on healthcare and which substantially outstrips the £68 billion British defence budget. Disability spending has jumped 25% over the last four years, and without reforms it will rise another 30% over the next four. Fuzzy psychiatric disability claims, from depression to ADHD, drive much of the expansion, as a whole universe of charities and AI-powered chatbots advise ever more able-bodied people on how they might opt in to this wonderful system of free money. Among many crazy details, we learn that those on disability can trade some of their cash benefits for new car leases every three years. This programme now accounts for one in seven automobile sales in Britain and has elevated the company handling these deals (Motability) to the largest automobile leasing concern in the country. The debt required to fund this and the rest of the British social system has driven borrowing costs to rates not seen since the 2008 financial crisis, while high taxes continue to encourage the emigration of the wealthy and productive.
These are the mere symptoms of a sickness that extends well beyond the United Kingdom. We are looking here at a fiscal and also a political crisis afflicting the entire postwar European model. Below the fold I want to explain the nature of this crisis and why our political systems seem powerless to address its fundamental causes – indeed, why many of our politicians seem determined to make it worse. With little chance of reform, we face a future of economic decay and declining living standards, culminating in sovereign debt crises and perhaps even political collapse. The postwar order is slowly dying, in its eighty-first year, of old age. There are no answers and nobody knows what will come next.
John Carter commented on Substack Notes:
The neglect of schools in order to pay for pensions is a particularly poignant phenomenon, a direct illustration of the old devouring the futures of the young. Eugyppius is correct that there’s no electoral solution to this mess. No one will vote to reduce their own benefits, and tax-eaters now comprise such a substantial electorate that any serious discussion of reform is political suicide.
State bankruptcy and economic collapse are real possibilities. Maybe “and then a dictator ends democracy” happens, but maybe not. For the young the all-devouring social state is increasingly unbearable. Polities that make themselves attractive to the young rather than the old could suck in such a large fraction of the youth that by the time collapse arrives, the social states are effectively retirement communities, and it just looks like a humanitarian crisis of starving geriatrics dying in their own unwashed bodily fluids.
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Everyone is Wrong about the Cromwell Tank
The Tank Museum
Published 19 Jun 2026Lacking firepower. Thin skinned. Many believe it was obsolete before it even went into combat.
Except … that isn’t all true.
Because the Cromwell didn’t just fight its way through Normandy, it was pivotal in the defeat of Nazi Germany.
After that, it held off Soviet expansion in Europe, held ground in Korea, and stayed in British service well into the 1950s.
So how did a tank everyone calls a failure end up doing all that?
In this video, we’re going to wade through the hate mail and see if we can convince you that actually the Cromwell did rather well.
00:00 | Introduction
00:52 | A Dysfunctional Start
04:42 | Built for Speed in a Slow War
09:48 | Failure in the Bocage, Victory in the Breakout
15:44 | The Tank That Wouldn’t Go AwayThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
In this video, join our historian James Donaldson in defence of the oft-maligned Cromwell. Emerging from troubled development, the Cromwell proved itself in the European theatre as an exceptional reconnaissance tank and continued to be used well beyond the end of the Second World War. It was fast and versatile, utterly devastating when used properly, and stayed in service longer than many of its critics would care to admit.
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